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A review by sausome
The Young Widower's Handbook by Tom McAllister
3.0
As other have said, this book began pretty wonderfully -- I enjoyed the prose, the character interaction, the story -- but about halfway through I got pretty bored and kept waiting for something to happen but it never did. This book probably would have been better without maybe the last 1/3 of the book - it just didn't add anything. I understand trying to explain the nothingness of grief; the inability to move on and stop remembering, but also not wanting to move on. But the car characters were pretty useless, plot-wise, and Hunter's complete inability to have any backbone about nearly everything gets tiring and irritating.
3 stars for being halfway great.
Some excerpts I liked from the enjoyable first half:
"But even when things were ostensibly going well, when he made the guys laugh at the lunch table or danced with a girl at a mixer, he felt that distance between him and his peers, an understanding that although he’d forged a connection, it was only temporary. Mostly he read books and smoked pot and watched endless hours of TV."
"By the time he met Kait, he’d accepted isolation as his fate, as a punishment for whatever part of him had gone bad at birth. Willow had assured him college would help him to open up and find himself, but he spent most of his time there wondering how everyone else felt so comfortable and confident. Wondering how everyone else knew what to do. It seemed like there was some secret handshake you were taught at birth by the Illuminati or the Freemasons or someone, and some people just weren’t allowed to learn it. So he rejected the world in advance and erected a series of defense mechanisms that would exacerbate his problems. By this point, his every thought and action was a reaction to a perceived or expected slight. He was a prodigy at bitterness and cynicism."
"You miss the nagging (and you hate calling it nagging because it makes you feel too much like a stereotypical put-upon sitcom husband, but that’s what it was, it was nagging) about your career prospects and your inadequate levels of motivation. You miss the arguments, from the monumental (i.e., here’s why we need to stop spending time with your awful brothers) to the minuscule (i.e., how hard is it to close a drawer when you’re done with it?). It’s the arguments that breathed life into the relationship. It’s in the arguments that you ultimately felt the love. It’s the passion inculcated by such dramas that makes you wish you could just one more time hear her say, “Of course it’s pronounced liberry,” a smirk lurking beneath her defensive façade, letting you know that soon you can smile and she can smile and you can kiss her and she can kiss you and everything will be fine."
"He often argued that romance isn’t about Big Gestures, but rather about the accumulation of the so-called little things. Big Gestures are not repeatable and cannot solely be counted on to keep a marriage afloat. It’s not the candlelight dinner on the waterfront, he said to her, but the guarantee of leftovers warming on the stove for you when you get home from work. It’s not rose petals scattered across the bedroom floor, but the neatly made bed and the nights spent watching movies together while sharing popcorn. It’s not about hot air balloon rides and champagne, but the comfort of having someone holding your hand when you’re stuck in traffic."
"She was frantic then, embarrassed at having slept in, and here he saw the duality of Kait: she could carry herself with poise and confidence in any company, but it would sap all of her resources to do so. People who only knew her casually or through work didn’t understand how anxious she was, never realized that she woke up a half hour early on workdays just to do deep-breathing exercises and prepare herself for a full day of dealing with the world."
3 stars for being halfway great.
Some excerpts I liked from the enjoyable first half:
"But even when things were ostensibly going well, when he made the guys laugh at the lunch table or danced with a girl at a mixer, he felt that distance between him and his peers, an understanding that although he’d forged a connection, it was only temporary. Mostly he read books and smoked pot and watched endless hours of TV."
"By the time he met Kait, he’d accepted isolation as his fate, as a punishment for whatever part of him had gone bad at birth. Willow had assured him college would help him to open up and find himself, but he spent most of his time there wondering how everyone else felt so comfortable and confident. Wondering how everyone else knew what to do. It seemed like there was some secret handshake you were taught at birth by the Illuminati or the Freemasons or someone, and some people just weren’t allowed to learn it. So he rejected the world in advance and erected a series of defense mechanisms that would exacerbate his problems. By this point, his every thought and action was a reaction to a perceived or expected slight. He was a prodigy at bitterness and cynicism."
"You miss the nagging (and you hate calling it nagging because it makes you feel too much like a stereotypical put-upon sitcom husband, but that’s what it was, it was nagging) about your career prospects and your inadequate levels of motivation. You miss the arguments, from the monumental (i.e., here’s why we need to stop spending time with your awful brothers) to the minuscule (i.e., how hard is it to close a drawer when you’re done with it?). It’s the arguments that breathed life into the relationship. It’s in the arguments that you ultimately felt the love. It’s the passion inculcated by such dramas that makes you wish you could just one more time hear her say, “Of course it’s pronounced liberry,” a smirk lurking beneath her defensive façade, letting you know that soon you can smile and she can smile and you can kiss her and she can kiss you and everything will be fine."
"He often argued that romance isn’t about Big Gestures, but rather about the accumulation of the so-called little things. Big Gestures are not repeatable and cannot solely be counted on to keep a marriage afloat. It’s not the candlelight dinner on the waterfront, he said to her, but the guarantee of leftovers warming on the stove for you when you get home from work. It’s not rose petals scattered across the bedroom floor, but the neatly made bed and the nights spent watching movies together while sharing popcorn. It’s not about hot air balloon rides and champagne, but the comfort of having someone holding your hand when you’re stuck in traffic."
"She was frantic then, embarrassed at having slept in, and here he saw the duality of Kait: she could carry herself with poise and confidence in any company, but it would sap all of her resources to do so. People who only knew her casually or through work didn’t understand how anxious she was, never realized that she woke up a half hour early on workdays just to do deep-breathing exercises and prepare herself for a full day of dealing with the world."