Review: The Not So Secret Emails Of Coco Pinchard

The Not So Secret Emails Of Coco Pinchard by Robert Bryndza

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Coco Pinchard always dreamed of being a successful writer, but then life got in the way. She married young, had a son, and put her dreams on hold… But now she’s forty, and her first novel is about to be published! Her husband Daniel has greyed nicely into a silver fox, and her son Rosencrantz is all grown up. Shouldn’t it be time to enjoy life?

Once again Robert Bryndza has totally entertained me! I discovered this author by chance about a year ago when a covers on a couple of his other books caught my eye on Good Reads. Book covers are very important to me and this particular one was bright and fun, giving me a really good idea of what I was in for. You see, as a graphic artist myself who does book covers, I hate to see sloppy or cheesy cover art slapped on a book. A good cover can make me click on the book to find out more about it…a bad cover I just pass by. Anyway (back to our regularly scheduled programming) his covers caught my eye and I have really enjoyed everything I have read of Mr. Bryndza’s!

This is the second of his entertaining and fun romantic comedies I have read so far and it proved the first was no fluke. I found it to be a realistic and funny look within a forty-something woman’s life that often had me laughing.

The only real downside to this one for me, and this is minor, comes from the version I had being the audio book rather than the print book. This particular story (as you can tell in the title) is based on e-mails flying off from Coco to her friends and family and as such there is quite a bit of redundant information read out by the narrator (To: xxxxxxxx, From: xxxxxxxxx, Date: xxxxxx, Time: xxxxxxx), you know….items that you would simply gloss over when physically reading but the narrator is duty-bound to read aloud, that did get quite tedious at times, but all that aside I still found this to be another fun, well developed story by Mr. Bryndza.

Coco Pinchard has quit her job as an English teacher to try her hand as an author and has just had her first book Chasing Diana Spencer released! Unfortunately, some don’t seem to understand that her book is about how things could have been had events in Diana’s tragic life gone differently, you know…like Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Bastards. A few bad reviews and bad interviews later things begin to go just a tad bit awry…and then they begin to disintegrate. So who’s a girl to turn to when her book is getting panned, her publicist and publisher dump her, her in-laws are driving her insane, and her husband cheats on her with Snow White? She’s turns to her friends of course….and that’s precisely what Coco (the perfume, not the hot beverage) does! Her iPhone turns into her own hilarious life-line.

In many ways this book reminds me of Bridget Jones’s Diary, not simply because of the e-mail aspect allowing the reader a much more personal approach to the story but because Coco is so real and easy to relate to. She isn’t the perfect romantic heroine, she smokes, she cusses, she’s middle aged and dealing with divorce and who is going through a mid-life crisis at the same time…and, like many of us she often says the wrong thing at the wrong time. Which prompts me to ask…if you use a cat as an excuse to get out of an awkward situation but you have no cat….do you then have to buy a cat so that when you run into that person again in the future and they ask about your cat….you won’t look like you were lying about said cat?

See, these are the things Coco wonders about too and I admit that it made me laugh because I’ve wondered that exact same thing.

What more could you ask for from a book? I related to Coco, she made me laugh, I rooted for her, I wanted to smack her ex and hug her son….and have a drink with her friends.

If you enjoy a fun Rom Com….check this one out by Robert Bryndza, it’s currently free on Amazon Unlimited and the audio book (if you don’t mind the minutia of the e-mails being read) is also really reasonably priced. I really think you will enjoy it as much as I did.

This reviewer will be adding more of his books to my “To Read” book shelf!

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