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A review by bonnieg
I Am Having So Much Fun Here Without You by Courtney Maum
3.0
I am going to start with the positive. I really enjoyed the last 50ish pages of this. Not because it was a happy or an unhappy ending (it depends on the reader I think which it was) but because things happened. I also rather like the first 50ish pages. It was the center 200 pages that proved problematic for a number of reasons.
Many have mentioned that we spend our time with a character who is horrible. I actually did not have a problem with Richard's shortcomings because his character grew and changed and that process has moments of interest. The bigger issue for me was that Richard's wife, Anne Laure, was perfect, flawless. First, perfect people are not very interesting. Second, its kind of hard to root for the couple to resolve their marital woes. Someone so perfect should have a someone equally perfect (though of course people this perfect do not exist in real life) and because if they re together one has to imagine she spends a lot of her time feeling cheated and he spends his time feeling inadequate. Third, the author tried and failed to meld the marital struggles of the main characters with the stupidity of W going into Iraq based on the existence of non-existent WMDs and it came off as needlessly complicated, clunky and silly. (Side note -- in the age of Trump destroying the entire freaking world its hard to be offended by W starting one little war.)
In the end the book was fine, but not reading the book would also have been fine. I kept putting it down and not missing it, but enjoying it well enough when I thought to pick it up. That seems like a weak 3-star to me.
Many have mentioned that we spend our time with a character who is horrible. I actually did not have a problem with Richard's shortcomings because his character grew and changed and that process has moments of interest. The bigger issue for me was that Richard's wife, Anne Laure, was perfect, flawless. First, perfect people are not very interesting. Second, its kind of hard to root for the couple to resolve their marital woes. Someone so perfect should have a someone equally perfect (though of course people this perfect do not exist in real life) and because if they re together one has to imagine she spends a lot of her time feeling cheated and he spends his time feeling inadequate. Third, the author tried and failed to meld the marital struggles of the main characters with the stupidity of W going into Iraq based on the existence of non-existent WMDs and it came off as needlessly complicated, clunky and silly. (Side note -- in the age of Trump destroying the entire freaking world its hard to be offended by W starting one little war.)
In the end the book was fine, but not reading the book would also have been fine. I kept putting it down and not missing it, but enjoying it well enough when I thought to pick it up. That seems like a weak 3-star to me.