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3.62 AVERAGE
3.62 AVERAGE
For some reason I liked this book even though I felt the author was a little self-absorbed, and her main attractions to her husband include his Wranglers, his cowboy hat, and his muscles. If I was the betting sort, I would say that this love match wouldn't last more than a couple of years. Since it's been 15 years, I guess I'm wrong.
The courtship part of the book is quite substantial and rather repetitive.
The book is a bit trite and oversimplified. I wish she had gone into more depth about her parents' marriage. She says she felt angry about it, but there weren't any details on WHY she was angry. Without her expanding on it, it makes the reader think she was angry because the separation messed up her wedding plans and her pregnancy.
Still, it's a fun read from a contemporary figure.
The courtship part of the book is quite substantial and rather repetitive.
The book is a bit trite and oversimplified. I wish she had gone into more depth about her parents' marriage. She says she felt angry about it, but there weren't any details on WHY she was angry. Without her expanding on it, it makes the reader think she was angry because the separation messed up her wedding plans and her pregnancy.
Still, it's a fun read from a contemporary figure.
I rated high because I can identify with so much of what Ree went through. I felt a very strong connection to the story!
If you like her blog, you'll love her book. Great story of the man she loved and the life they built together! :)
Ugghhhhhh. I never read Drummond's blog and I feel like if I had come in from there I would like this more. But reading it all at once I just cannot stand it.
This falls into the middle class whiny white woman problems books that piss me off. I feel the same about [b:Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen|13747|Julie and Julia 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen|Julie Powell|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1166572517s/13747.jpg|3338312] and [b:Eat, Pray, Love|19501|Eat, Pray, Love|Elizabeth Gilbert|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1294023455s/19501.jpg|3352398]. I'm a middle class white woman myself, and I barely want to listen to my own petty problems. Oh, ladies, to write whole books about your first world problems.
Ree comes off as a shallow, annoying, whiny, self-centered child. Her husband is undeniably manly and seems great, but also lacks any depth. He is like a caricature of a cowboy, not an actual human being.
Post-college, Ree comes home and…lives with her parents. She buys a $400 coat off JCrew when the book starts. With whose money? She has no source of income. All she does is apparently sit about her house and date. She has no apparent hobbies or friends or even plans to get a job. She wants to move to Chicago and even puts down a deposit on an apartment (again, on whose dime?) but never talks about what she wants to do there, what jobs she’s applying for. Apparently her only goal is “live in Chicago.” Which sounds great, I wish I could do that. But how she write it just makes her look spoiled and lazy.
And poor, poor J (Ree's long-term college boyfriend). I know he isn’t as manly as Marlboro Man (what man besides Chuck Norris is?) but Ree cheats on him mercilessly without any guilt. I understand she was a young 25 at the time, but she is now a thirty-something mother of four. You think she would’ve realized by now how horrible she’s been. But I don’t think she was built for that much introspection. She thinks that leaving California is a perfectly clear message. You don’t have to actually tell someone that you want to break up! Just string them along, date other people (but don’t tell your actual boyfriend!), uninvite them to family weddings and don’t return phone calls! Sure, it’s passive-aggressive, but hey, if they don’t get the message it’s their own damn fault for being such clueless pansies!
Ree states that "I didn’t enjoy causing another person pain. I’d deliberately gone about the breakup process slowly, compassionately, gently—taking great care not to hurt the one person who’d meant the most to me during all my years in California…I realized the hard way that there was no such thing as gradually breaking someone’s heart, no matter how much you think prolonging the process might help." By this she means passive-aggressively dodging him for months. And then after this seeming revelation she refuses to see J when he flies into town for her.
And THEN she gets pissed off at J for thinking he was still dating the girl who had refused to actually tell him she wanted to break up. “I was starting to get mad. J was clearly hurt; I understood that. He’d clearly felt blindsided by our split, even though it had been months and months in the making. But while I’d been busy not following him to San Francisco, not visiting him with any frequency, and involving him less and less in my life back home, J, by his account, had been happy as a clam with our relationship, taking for granted just about everything that mattered." Maybe he was just in love with you and never expected the person he loved to string him along and cheat on him.
Why was Ree refusing to let go of the four-year relationship she was obviously ready to be done with? Did she lack the balls to actually go through the messiness of a break-up? Is she just thoughtlessly cruel? Who knows!
She is repeatedly selfish in the book. It’s her own goddamn memoir, for Chrissakes! You’d think she’d paint herself in a better light. But, no, everything is about her. When she writes about her developmentally disabled younger brother, the message is constantly God, why is he so annoying? Why does he have to embarrass me all the time? Why is my life so harrrrdddd??????. Same with her parents’ divorce. All she does is whine about how hard it is on her. There are even parts where Ree’s all, I wanted to tell my mom I was pregnant, but then she had to go and get separated from my Dad which totally killed my good news. GOD, why are my parents’ problems making my life so inconvenient? Jesus, Ree. It’s not always all about you.
Plus, this book is repetitive. Three separate times, Ree talks about how hot and bothered she gets when Marlboro Man takes charge [manly!] and how MM shows up unexpectedly while she’s still asleep and ohmygod I look terrible! He does it often enough, Ree. Do your hair before you go to bed and buy cuter PJs. Maybe a sexy slip or boxer shorts or something?
And the whole courtship was basically: Ree is whiny. MM is manly. They make out. Rinse and repeat. It was dull. While MM is mostly the perfect manly man in Ree’s story, his other defining character trait is his “mah silly womahn” attitude. Like, when Ree says she only wants one kid he brushes her off and was like “no, we’ll have more, sweetcheeks.”
Apparently Ree’s blog is really popular, so maybe in small doses she’s palatable? The movie version should have Amy Adams as Ree, because she has proven she can take the whiny neurotic and make her utterly adorable. As it was, this book was bad. Oh, and I learned more than I ever needed to know about breastfeeding. It was gross and way TMI.
This falls into the middle class whiny white woman problems books that piss me off. I feel the same about [b:Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen|13747|Julie and Julia 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen|Julie Powell|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1166572517s/13747.jpg|3338312] and [b:Eat, Pray, Love|19501|Eat, Pray, Love|Elizabeth Gilbert|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1294023455s/19501.jpg|3352398]. I'm a middle class white woman myself, and I barely want to listen to my own petty problems. Oh, ladies, to write whole books about your first world problems.
Ree comes off as a shallow, annoying, whiny, self-centered child. Her husband is undeniably manly and seems great, but also lacks any depth. He is like a caricature of a cowboy, not an actual human being.
Post-college, Ree comes home and…lives with her parents. She buys a $400 coat off JCrew when the book starts. With whose money? She has no source of income. All she does is apparently sit about her house and date. She has no apparent hobbies or friends or even plans to get a job. She wants to move to Chicago and even puts down a deposit on an apartment (again, on whose dime?) but never talks about what she wants to do there, what jobs she’s applying for. Apparently her only goal is “live in Chicago.” Which sounds great, I wish I could do that. But how she write it just makes her look spoiled and lazy.
And poor, poor J (Ree's long-term college boyfriend). I know he isn’t as manly as Marlboro Man (what man besides Chuck Norris is?) but Ree cheats on him mercilessly without any guilt. I understand she was a young 25 at the time, but she is now a thirty-something mother of four. You think she would’ve realized by now how horrible she’s been. But I don’t think she was built for that much introspection. She thinks that leaving California is a perfectly clear message. You don’t have to actually tell someone that you want to break up! Just string them along, date other people (but don’t tell your actual boyfriend!), uninvite them to family weddings and don’t return phone calls! Sure, it’s passive-aggressive, but hey, if they don’t get the message it’s their own damn fault for being such clueless pansies!
Ree states that "I didn’t enjoy causing another person pain. I’d deliberately gone about the breakup process slowly, compassionately, gently—taking great care not to hurt the one person who’d meant the most to me during all my years in California…I realized the hard way that there was no such thing as gradually breaking someone’s heart, no matter how much you think prolonging the process might help." By this she means passive-aggressively dodging him for months. And then after this seeming revelation she refuses to see J when he flies into town for her.
And THEN she gets pissed off at J for thinking he was still dating the girl who had refused to actually tell him she wanted to break up. “I was starting to get mad. J was clearly hurt; I understood that. He’d clearly felt blindsided by our split, even though it had been months and months in the making. But while I’d been busy not following him to San Francisco, not visiting him with any frequency, and involving him less and less in my life back home, J, by his account, had been happy as a clam with our relationship, taking for granted just about everything that mattered." Maybe he was just in love with you and never expected the person he loved to string him along and cheat on him.
Why was Ree refusing to let go of the four-year relationship she was obviously ready to be done with? Did she lack the balls to actually go through the messiness of a break-up? Is she just thoughtlessly cruel? Who knows!
She is repeatedly selfish in the book. It’s her own goddamn memoir, for Chrissakes! You’d think she’d paint herself in a better light. But, no, everything is about her. When she writes about her developmentally disabled younger brother, the message is constantly God, why is he so annoying? Why does he have to embarrass me all the time? Why is my life so harrrrdddd??????. Same with her parents’ divorce. All she does is whine about how hard it is on her. There are even parts where Ree’s all, I wanted to tell my mom I was pregnant, but then she had to go and get separated from my Dad which totally killed my good news. GOD, why are my parents’ problems making my life so inconvenient? Jesus, Ree. It’s not always all about you.
Plus, this book is repetitive. Three separate times, Ree talks about how hot and bothered she gets when Marlboro Man takes charge [manly!] and how MM shows up unexpectedly while she’s still asleep and ohmygod I look terrible! He does it often enough, Ree. Do your hair before you go to bed and buy cuter PJs. Maybe a sexy slip or boxer shorts or something?
And the whole courtship was basically: Ree is whiny. MM is manly. They make out. Rinse and repeat. It was dull. While MM is mostly the perfect manly man in Ree’s story, his other defining character trait is his “mah silly womahn” attitude. Like, when Ree says she only wants one kid he brushes her off and was like “no, we’ll have more, sweetcheeks.”
Apparently Ree’s blog is really popular, so maybe in small doses she’s palatable? The movie version should have Amy Adams as Ree, because she has proven she can take the whiny neurotic and make her utterly adorable. As it was, this book was bad. Oh, and I learned more than I ever needed to know about breastfeeding. It was gross and way TMI.
I loved this book, mostly because I follow Ree's blog, The Pioneer Woman. I would encourage anyone who wants to read this book to check out her blog first, than read it. It is a quick read too, I finished it in 2 days.
I have watched Ree Drummond on television and have checked out her website. Curious to learn more, I read this book. It makes me wish that I knew her in person. I love her writing style--self-deprecating, witty, and down to earth. You can feel the intensity of her romance and are drawn into her life. This book made me smile and appreciate how much she loves her Marlboro Man.
City girl falls in love with a cowboy and has adventures in romance and on the farm. True story told with spirit and fun.
I really liked this book a lot. I've started reading The Pioneer Woman's blog fairly frequently over the last year or so (and recording her show on my DVR and trying many of her delicious recipes) so I hadn't read any of this before. Some reviewers were upset that a large chunk of this was on her blog, but that didn't bother me at all. It would have been a pain for me to go back and find all of that years later.
The writing is really good and funny. I laughed out loud so many times while reading this, and I loved the romance between her Marlboro Man. I might even have to look into her children's books for my little boy.
The writing is really good and funny. I laughed out loud so many times while reading this, and I loved the romance between her Marlboro Man. I might even have to look into her children's books for my little boy.
This was a great book - quick and entertaining. I read her love story in forty-something parts on her website, but reading the book was still as exciting and heartwarming. It always amazes me that their story is a real-life fairy tale with prince charming sweeping her off her feet.