Grab Wife 22 Showcased By Melanie Gideon Accessible In Edition
a sucker for good chick lit, Or women's fiction. Or domestic fiction. Whatever it's called these days,
This is the story of Alice Buckle, Alice signs up for a study about marriage in thest century and realizes she isn't as happy as she thought, Alice isn't perfect, her husband and kids aren't either, but this book is pretty close, The ending is fantastic with a bit of a twist I didn't expect, A great read for a summer day, Oh, I absolutely adored Wifeby Melanie Gideon! It's clever, warm, witty, charming, funny, quirky, thoughtful, entertaining did I say clever And just well just a really good read!
Alice Buckle has been happily married for over twenty years, but lately finds herself wondering about many things her children, her health, her job and more, but most notably her relationship with her husband.
They seem to be drifting apart, Or is it just settling into mid life together
"I know roommate is a taboo word, but here's a thought: what if being roommates is the natural stage of the middle part of marriage What if that's the way it supposed to be The only way we can be while getting through the long, hard slog of raising kids and trying to save money for retirement and coming to terms with the fact that there is no such thing as retirement anymore and we'll be working until the day we die"
When the opportunity to makeparticipating in an online relationship survey appears in her inbox, Alice decides to participate.
For anonymity's sake, she is labeled as Wifeand paired with Researcher,
Gideon utilizes many different methods to tell Alice's story, Google search results, Twitter and Facebook postings, emails and the answers to the survey without the questions, Now they are listed in the back of the book, I thought about flipping back and forth but found it more fun to discern from the answer what the question might have been.
As Alice continues the survey, the professional lines between herself and Researcherbecome blurred and Alice has to make a choice about the direction she wants her life to go.
Ahh, where to start I loved Alice Buckle the way her mind worked, her actions, her insecurities, her failures, her successes and more.
She just seemed to be such a 'real' person, Gideon's cast of supporting characters is no less captivating, They're all equally well drawn, but Peter, her twelve year old son, was a stand out for me,
Employing the online excerpts was a clever way to expand on Alice's story, Gideon is a very funny woman I found myself laughing out loud many times, And stopping to think many times as well Wifeexplores married life with a keen eye,
Highly recommended I predict this one showing up on lots of summer reading lists, I loved this book. I couldn't put it down, Thank goodness for a sick day!! I am Alice Buckle, . . minus the friends. : I was hooked from the beginning, I related to Alice and needed to see where the journey took her, her husband and her family, Do they make it Do they succumb and become another statistic Do they beat the odds which in todays society are all too often stacked against us, or so it seems.
Maybe it just speaks to those of us in the middleaged doldrums of parenting and marriage but I'd like to think it speaks to anyone who has gotten caught up in the daytoday "living" and lost themselves in the process.
I'd like to buy this one for my Nook so I can make notes, highlight my favorite passages and reread, So cute! So clever! So nauseating!
She spends too much time online, Can she reconnect with her husband Can she recover her creative spark and become the playwright she once wanted to be What about her children Is her son gay not that there's anything wrong with that! her best friend is a hip lesbian.
Is her daughter bulimic, or is it something much more ridiculous and twee Oh the handwringing! And look, here comes another man.
. . who likes pina coladas. But does he like getting caught in the rain Meanwhile, she shops atth street in Berkeley which is so chic, just right for her age group.
And guess where her teenaged daughter shops How did you know it was the Goodwill!
The movie won't come out for a few years, as they will have to wait for the everannoying Zoe Deschanel to age into the role.
And perhaps she'll have a daughter by then who can play the adorable little teen daughter character, Make sure you buy popcorn and save the container, because you're gonna need it when you throw up in the theater,
The title conjures images of polygamy, but this is very much a novel of modern monogamy, Along with traditional narration, the story unfolds in a series of Facebook and Twitter updates, text messages, emails, Google searches, and even playwriting scenes.
This can be disorienting at times, but it effectively mimics the minutebyminute, needtoknow lifestyle of the typical pluggedin American, For an atypical, mostly unplugged American like me, this was quite a revelation,
Alice Buckle is a warmhearted worrier, She worries that her son Peter might be gay and afraid to come out, She worries that her daughter Zoe might have an eating disorder, She worries about her drooping eyelids, And she worries that her relationship with her husband William has lost its pizzazz afteryears,
Alice agrees to participate in an online study of marriage in thest century, Anonymity guaranteed. She is now "Wife," assigned to
"Researcher, " Being anonymous allows Alice to reveal herself more deeply to the researcher than she would to anyone IRL, and a strange intimacy builds between them.
Meanwhile, she's trying to manage a household full of people so connected to their electronic devices that they've almost forgotten how to connect face to face.
This is not my usual fare, but I found it entertaining and even touching, There are a lot of true laughoutloud moments, funny because they're realistic rather than contrived, Definitely fun light reading. And if you can relate to Alice, so much the better, She might inspire you to put some zing back in your own longterm relationship,
copy provided by the publisher,
For those to whom it matters, the story is told entirely in the present tense,
Update: I have now seen complaints from two readers stating that they were frustrated at not knowing what questions Alice was answering in the survey.
There is an appendix at the back of the book listing all the questions, When you start seeing numbered responses, just look in the back for the correspondingly numbered questions, .