I enjoyed this! Admittedly I stan Linda Holmes like mad, so there's that, but it's a real delight - some of the set pieces are super effective (the scene in the kitchen with the screw jar was a highlight). Interesting that there are two single fathers in this, I felt like the sub-sub-plot about Evvie's mother was resolved a bit hastily, but generally people in it evolved about the regular rate of human beings.
posted by Gin and Broadband at 1:24 AM on August 11, 2019 [2 favorites]

I absolutely loved this book. I pre-ordered it, read it in six hours. I thought it was funny and sweet and sad. I cried in some spots. I loved Evvie a lot. And I loved Dean. (I saw on Instagram somewhere that Holmes -- who I also stan for liiiiiiife -- suggested Chris Evans and Melanie Lynskey as dream casting for an imagined film. YES. YES. YES.)

I wanted Evvie to take to goddamn life insurance money. I get her hangup about it, but girl, please. Take your shitty husband's money.

I was wincing so hard at the fight between Evvie and her best friend. I think I actually put down the book and had to brace myself for it.

It's such a great book. My expectations were high and they were absolutely met. And, like, I hate baseball, I hate all sports, and all the baseball talk didn't bother me even a little.
posted by Aquifer at 7:39 AM on August 12, 2019 [3 favorites]

I really enjoyed this book as well. The odds were good, since I like Linda Holmes' writing anyway, but I was excited to discover how much I liked Evvie (answer: a lot).

It was pretty much the kind of romance story I like best - funny, humane, and capturing something very true.
posted by PussKillian at 9:45 AM on August 13, 2019 [2 favorites]

I was, sadly, disappointed. I wanted to like the book, and the sports, though not my thing, were fine. But where were the other women? We had Evvie, her male best friend (his barely there daughters and late in novel girlfriend don't much count), her male roommate-to-lover, her father. It only avoids being Not Like Other Girls because there are no other girls for her to be Not Like. An awful lot of mothers deserting children, too.

I'd read her next book, because this was cute, but only if someone confirmed to me that it actually included women plural in it.
posted by jeather at 6:26 PM on August 14, 2019

I liked this book, but was surprised that the part that I would consider a barrier isn't necessarily the tolerance for baseball talk, but the tolerance for Maine.

Emotionally it worked really well, and I definitely got anxious whenever overprepared food came up. The steak is too nice! Rough waters ahead!

I disagree that Monica doesn't count as an important female character - for one thing, she's the only one who calls out the former husband's actions as emotional abuse. And I think it's intentional that the men in the story categorize it as shitty but not abusive, but the one woman who knows what's going on points it out straight away. Also, the action that Monica is pointing out as emotionally abusive is Tim controlling her other relationships. She has no female friends because she wasn't allowed to have her own friends - Andy snuck in as a couple friend that decoupled. At the point when she and Monica start texting each other, she's still so desperate for any sort of connection that has nothing to do with Tim. Weirdly, the person I wanted Evvie to apologize the most to during the Evvie/Andy fight was Monica.

But yeah, I was wondering if there was going to be more on the connection between Evvie staying in that relationship and her mother leaving - I felt the Andy's Ex and Evvie parallels were well enough examined (or just seemed below-the-surface obvious), but I was expecting a little more from the mom issues.
posted by dinty_moore at 6:58 PM on October 27, 2019 [1 favorite]