Title: The Bette Davis Club
Author: Jane Lotter
Publisher: Lake Union Publishing
Date: December 8th, 2015
Pages: 274
Format: eARC
Source: from Publisher for a review
Synopsis (from Goodreads):
The morning of her niece’s wedding, Margo Just drinks a double martini and contemplates the many mistakes she’s made in her fifty-odd years of life. Spending three decades in love with a wonderful but unattainable man is pretty high up on her list of missteps, as is a long line of unsuccessful love affairs accompanied by a seemingly endless supply of delicious cocktails.
When the young bride flees—taking with her a family heirloom and leaving behind six hundred bewildered guests—her mother offers Margo fifty grand to retrieve her spoiled brat of a daughter and the invaluable property she stole. So, together with the bride’s jilted and justifiably crabby fiancé, Margo sets out in a borrowed 1955 red MG on a cross-country chase. Along the way, none of what she discovers will be quite what she expected. But it might be exactly what she’s been seeking all along.
From acclaimed humor writer Jane Lotter comes this madcap, laugh-out-loud adventure, The Bette Davis Club.
Revised edition: This edition of The Bette Davis Club includes editorial revisions.
Review:
Reading story narrated by a woman who’s over 50 years old was out of my comfort zone, but I wanted to do it anyway. Branching out, spreading my horizonts, that’s what I was thinking about.
I knew that, what I was about to read was a comedy, but if you ask me what was it that I expected from this book, I wouldn’t know what to tell you.
The story follows Margo, a fifty-something years old woman who finds herself at her niece’s wedding. Everything would be great if there wasn’t just one problem: the bride is missing. She ran away, and Margo’s sister is asking her to find her. Margo wouldn’t accept that request usually, but 50 000 dollars deal is hard to decline.
On her roadtrip, she won’t be alone. Tully, the groom, is going with her to try to convince the love of his life to change her mind.
Let me just starting this review by telling you what I liked:
The writing style. The story is written in present tense and it pulls you in immediately. Good sense of humor can’t hurt either. Even though the story itself is not so good, the writing style is what keeps you reading and, believe it or not, I actually had good time reading it (most of the time).
The Title. It has a meaning and it is awesome (I’m a proud member of The Bette Davis Club myself).
Sidestory, or should I say, Morgo’s past. That part of the novel is what is actually worth reading. I think that story is really good, it can make you feel and, honestly, if the writer decided to write only that story, the novel would be better.
Now, let me tell you what I didn’t like:
Characters. Not only did some of them had stupid names, but they were also… stupid. There is only one character (Dotty) that I can say was intelligent enough, but no one else.
They got themselves in bizzare situations, had no idea how to handle them, weren’t thinking whatsoever and honestly, if they had only little intelligence, the problem would be solved really quickly and this would be a short story.
One character even says for himself that pople are telling him he has high IQ and I was all like…. NO, YOU DON’T!
They also have no dignity or self esteem.
I really hated most of the scenes in this book. They were unnecessary, stupid and just made me roll my eyes instead of wondering what will happen and rooting for main characters.
That being said, I think I should stop now because there is really nothing good I could say, and since I am huge Bambi fan, I know what Thumper’s father told him and I listen to his advice…
“If you can’t say something nice, don’t say nothing at all.”
(Thunder’s father, Bambi)
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