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Einmal Happy Ohne End, Bitte! (2014)

by Lindsey Kelk(Favorite Author)

3.94 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

3442380189 (ISBN13: 9783442380183)

languge

English

genre

Romance

publisher

Blanvalet

review 1: Oh how I enjoyed this book. Maybe it started with a 4 star but for me definitely finished 5 star. 3 main characters, Rachel who has been dumped by the man she lives with Simon. On hand to pick up the pieces are her 2 very close friends Emelie and Matthew, not *Matt*. Matthew is their lovely gay friend and I would love him in my life. After several drunken nights out, Rachel does a to do list, things out of the ordinary for her, to test her life as a single lady. She is a make up artist and often works along side Dan who is a photographer. This list is written on a crumpled napkin and Rachel gets a boost each time she accomplishes a task. This book is both funny and poignant if you think of the book as having a moral line to it. Too many couples stay in a relationship that ... moreis stale because it is the easy thing to do and often what you need is right under your eyes. A really good read.
review 2: I liked this book a lot more than I expected to. For starters, I actually liked the main character, Rachel, which is quite a feat these days (most chick-lit seems to have resigned itself to creating nothing but grating heroines). I liked the main moral of the story, too: she has to put herself first for once - she can't be a doormat anymore. It was nice for that to happen finally, even if it replaced the grand romantic moment that could have been. I particularly enjoyed her final rejection of her awful ex-boyfriend - she was gentle, but firm, in ways that he wasn't. She didn't take the kind of revenge that she had the opportunity to. I finally felt like I had found a chick-lit heroine who started off mature and ended up more mature; I didn't question at any point how she was able to shower in the morning without drowning, like I do with most chick-lit heroines. All of the weird, whacky crap that happens to Rachel over the course of the novel was actually quite entertaining instead of boring, like I had originally thought it would be. This book had the potential to get too self-absorbed in its own cleverness, but Kelk did a very good job of creating these hilarious scenarios and just letting her characters to react to them. I particularly enjoyed the sprinkler incident and the trip to Canada. Moreover, Kelk's prose is clear, concise, and relatable without being too informal. I felt like I was in Rachel's head all the time, but it still read like a coherent novel. It was one of the best jobs I've seen that makes the heroine immensely relatable, even though I, the reader, at first felt like I had little in common with her. The conversations between the characters seemed realistic, and Rachel's concerns were actually totally legitimate and relatable. Kelk included conversations that are unpleasant or a little weird but that all of us have every day in real life. It was refreshing to see a chick-lit heroine obsess over her ratty underwear, or her employability, or the way a guy is obviously touching his junk in public but pretending he isn't. Normal, but not necessarily cinematic conversations. The main squeeze of the book is a typical chick-lit hero, but I enjoyed Kelk's version a lot; he is someone who has created this persona for himself in order to avoid being hurt, but all it's done is make Rachel completely disillusioned with him. It was nice that her expectations were kind of turned on their head: with him, she had preconceived notions, but they were too cynical instead of imposing impossible standards on him, like she does with another one of her suitors. I also like that he was more of a jerk than the typical chick-lit hero, who actually admitted his mistakes instead of the heroine just accepting his suckiness as a personality quirk. Of course, his secret utter devotion to Rachel made me love him even more and understand where he was coming from. But at the end of the day, the real romance of this book is not between Rachel and her hero, but between Rachel and her two best friends, Emelie and Matthew. The first person POV of the book allowed me to see them through Rachel's eyes and understand just how much she loved them. Honestly, the story of her friendship with Emelie, in particular, was at times more romantic than the story of her and her love interest. Over the course of the book, Rachel understands just how much her friends love her and what they would do for her: Emelie practically moves into Rachel's apartment after the break-up even though Emelie has her own, very nice place. She and Rachel are completely in sync, and there's no jealousy or cattiness between them. Her relationship with Matthew is a little less secure, but the items on the titular "to-do" list eventually show us, the readers, how important he is to her. Reading about Rachel's relationships with her two best friends was honestly a treat, and they were just as much main characters as she was. No scene felt complete with their presence. This was the real love story of the book, confirmed in a few chapters before the end, when her journey ends not with her love interest, but with them by her side. I couldn't put it down after a while, and read the last half in a matter of hours. The only reason I'm not rating it 5 stars is that there were some problematic attitudes towards women in the story, and the way women are treated. Words like "slag" and "cow" were used with way too much frequency, and made me have a lot less sympathy with Rachel and her friends. Rachel calling Anastasia a "slag" and a "vacuous cow" didn't make me side with Rachel all too much, nor did it make me hate Anastasia. I think Kelk should have emphasized Anastasia's actually bad qualities (like her vapidness, her self-absorption, her cruelty) instead of just having the main character call her names. And Rachel seems to really worry about being labeled a "slag," which just made me a little sad about how she must see herself and other women. Matthew's aversion to female genitals and body parts was not a cute personality quirk, and it wasn't excusable just because he's gay: it's just misogyny, plain and simple. That's why I had a harder time getting to like Matthew than I did the other characters. Also, his promiscuity was in a lot of ways more validated by the narrative than the promiscuity of any female characters. Also, using slurs like "r*tarded" was not cool lingo, it was just offensive. Overall, great read: it's hard to come by chick lit novels this solid and relatable. I just wish it had a little less misogyny in it. (There were also some editing errors in my kindle edition). less

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