Men Being Dinks, Women Dealing With the Fallout

Alice is abandoned by her husband on their Honeymoon. Abandoned as in she wakes up one morning and he’s gone with just a note stating that he’s bouncing on the whole marriage, no further explanation. When she gets home she calls his mom and his office and quickly realizes no one in his life has any more idea what’s going on that she does.

With no idea really what to do, Alice goes back to work at the gallery she manages and tries to act as normal as she can. While there, an older woman, Evelyn, enters and sits looking at what turns out to be her favorite painting, which happens to be at the gallery on loan. The two women strike up a friendship and over the coarse of the book we alternate between their two narratives as they grow closer.

This book is pretty much exactly what people are talking about when they use the term “chick lit,” for better or for worse. This isn’t to insinuate that it is bad, there is quite good chick lit out there, but it does fall very much into the “women talk to each other about men” category. This generally isn’t my bag, so I tend to be a little cynical about these kinds of plot lines, but as it goes this is a good one. I was engaged, especially with Evelyn’s story. I did find myself starting to wish that both of them would realize how much they had going on in their lives that had nothing to do with the guys jerking them around, especially Alice. Girl, you have a job most artsy women would give their eye teeth for, a great apartment, loving friends, including this new friend in Evelyn that is providing so much support for you… yeah, your husband is a dink and it’s completely lame how he behaved, but, especially after some time has passed, there really is more to life.

This is my own bias talking, if you tend to enjoy relationship-based novels you could do a lot worse than this one. The characters are well drawn, and it speaks well that I cared enough about Alice that I wanted her to get over her husband and live her own life. Plus, it’s included in the Amazon Prime section, so if you have access to that you can read it for free, which doesn’t hurt anything.