The Blonde Diaries

So earlier this spring I was shopping at Target with my friend and came across Jane Green’s book The Other Woman. The cover of the book seemed intriguing as it alluded to a story about a girl trying to plan her wedding without killing her future mother-in-law.  That sounds familiar to many people I’m sure. I’m not a huge Jane Green fan, in fact, I’ve only read one other book, Mr. Maybe, many years ago.  But, I’m a sucker for chick lit and was in the middle of planning my own wedding at the time so I thought I’d give this one a try.

This book took about one week to finish reading a few chapters here and there.  I have to admit that I was disappointed in this book.  I thought the book was going to focus on planning a wedding with an overbearing future mother-in-law. Well that was over within the first 4 chapters. The rest of the book focused on the passive-aggressive relationship between Ellie and Linda (the mother-in-law) and Dan (Ellie’s husband) once Ellie and Dan were already married.  The book title held true that the book was about the “other woman” in their married life but I felt the “quotes” about the book and the summary on the back cover were misleading.

In any case the thing I disliked the most about this book was that there was no real character development or plot development.  Everything moved so quickly in this book that you couldn’t pause to really reflect on what was going on or really get a mental picture of the events in the book. As I mentioned before, within 4 chapters the wedding was planned and over.  Another two or three chapters and Ellie and Dan already had the baby – where did those 9 months go?!?!  There are a few other things that went the same way but I don’t want to ruin anything in the book.

Overall, the book was ok.  I’d borrow it from the library or a friend but I wouldn’t spend any money buying the book (new or used) as it just was not great.

Tags: Books, Chick Lit, Jane Green, The Other Woman, TOW