Sigrid H. (sigrid) reviewed on + 55 more book reviews
Helpful Score: 2
Freya is a thirtysomething, transplanted Brit in New York, focused on survival. Jack is her friend of ten years, a writer trying to work through his block. Their relationship is based on mutual humor, and a surprising innocence from when they first met, but the story opens after Freya has been publicly dumped by the man she'd expected to ask her to marry him. She is determined not to let it break her, and crashes Jack's poker game, desperate for distraction. When Jack discovers she doesn't have a place to stay, he offers to let her stay with him for a couple weeks while she rebounds.
It doesn't exactly work out. Freya and Jack get on each other's nerves almost from the start, primarily because of the different places they are in their lives. Freya is in a place where her normal emotional walls are even higher than usual, and she has little tolerance for the freestyle way Jack leads his life. He dates young twentysomethings he meets through his teaching, and he floats along, subsidized by a monthly allowance from his father. They pull caustic pranks on the other, though their friendship seems to eventually weather all of them, enough at least for Freya to ask him to pose as her boyfriend at her stepsister's wedding.
The writing is sharp and humorous, and the scenarios laugh out loud funny even while they made me cringe at how mean they could be. Freya and Jack are often quite unlikeable in the stunts they pull, though my annoyance with them was never enough to pull me from enjoying the story. It just made them more realistic for me, and easier to wish a happy ending for (though the truncated and mildly ambiguous ending is probably the one thing I dislike most about this book).
It doesn't exactly work out. Freya and Jack get on each other's nerves almost from the start, primarily because of the different places they are in their lives. Freya is in a place where her normal emotional walls are even higher than usual, and she has little tolerance for the freestyle way Jack leads his life. He dates young twentysomethings he meets through his teaching, and he floats along, subsidized by a monthly allowance from his father. They pull caustic pranks on the other, though their friendship seems to eventually weather all of them, enough at least for Freya to ask him to pose as her boyfriend at her stepsister's wedding.
The writing is sharp and humorous, and the scenarios laugh out loud funny even while they made me cringe at how mean they could be. Freya and Jack are often quite unlikeable in the stunts they pull, though my annoyance with them was never enough to pull me from enjoying the story. It just made them more realistic for me, and easier to wish a happy ending for (though the truncated and mildly ambiguous ending is probably the one thing I dislike most about this book).
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