As you may or may not already know about me, I’m a very big reader. I enjoy reading various genres to help get my imagination going (and maybe, inspire me enough to get my damn novel finished!).
This post is about two novels I read recently that I would label as romance with a comical feel-good vibe. Here is my take on two books I brought on a rim on recent shops:
‘We never have sex anymore’ by Julia Jones.
This book had me drawn in from the beginning, a witty comedy about a woman called Lottie, who has been in a blissful loved-up marriage for quite some time. Except for one problem: they never have sex anymore.
Lottie gets drunk one night and makes the intoxicated error of calling in to her favourite Sex talk podcast about the lack of intimacy in her marriage, although anonymous to begin with, what happens next is a chain of unexpected events which result in her personal problems becoming viral, experiments take place courtesy of the podcast, with some extremely funny outcomes but there’s one big problem. Lottie has not told her husband about any of this.
I really enjoyed reading this book. It was written very well, very modern and also had many LOL moments. It was real and relatable I think for a lot of people, but also pressed on one of the most important things we all need to have in relationships but forget easily: Communication.
I couldn’t stop reading this as it made me intrigued as to how it would all play out. Julia wrote it so well that I didn’t want to put it down and was dying to find out just how Lottie would get herself out of this mess, and not to mention the intrigue as to why her husband was so oblivious it seems and not wanting to have sex with her. I think the novel does well at touching on a lot of modern problems we can have in our relationships, not to mention how taboo we still find it to just tell a partner how we’re feeling or that we want to be intimate. It was a thoroughly enjoyable read and I’d recommend it to those of you who maybe want to try something that’s easy to read and can give you a good giggle.
‘The Good Part’ by Sophie Cousens
I actually read this one a while back but have been dying to write about it as soon as I got my blog up and running. I’d never heard anything about this before and came across it in 66books (a warehouse in Hemel Hempstead that does twice a month book clubs where you can buy books at a discounted price – highly recommended), I was intrigued by the blurb so added it to my basket. What I didn’t expect was to read the book so quickly when I got going.
The story focuses on Lucy Young, she’s twenty-six and completely fed up with her life (we’ve all been there), by chance she comes across a wishing machine in a local store, wishing that she could get to ‘the good part’ of her life. When she wakes up the next morning, she’s forty-something, happily married with two children. The only problem is, as perfect as this life is, she doesn’t know anything about her life between when she made the wish and this ‘present’ moment. As she tries to navigate this new life and understand it all, there’s a lot of sad and horrible lessons she learns about what’s happened in her life that she doesn’t remember, because of course, she personally hasn’t experienced it.
As the blurb states at the end ‘Does she want to go back to being the girl she once was? Or is the good part bright enough to stay in?’.
I don’t want to spoil the plot and the outcome, as I highly recommend you read it yourself, but what I will say about this book is that it handles the dilemma beautifully and not in some predictable way which I always found frustrating with some time-travel novels and movies, you know the one’s, where they see what their future is like so they go back knowing what’s ahead of them. I always think that as tempting as we all may be, it is a massive cheat. Sophie Cousens writes this book so well where you can really relate to the dilemma Lucy is facing, she writes it all so beautifully, also spreading an important message about how we may not always appreciate the ‘good part’ in our lives, if we haven’t been through the bad.
A beautifully well-written novel that made me feel really positive at the end – it was at a time that I really needed to read it as I was experiencing a bit of a slump with my life, there were even certain parts of it that made me teary. A beautiful book to suggest for anyone who may themselves be wishing they could skip to the good part!
If you are looking for a bit of a giggle, or a positive feeling – I recommend you grabbing your hands on these books ASAP 🙂
Positive, Yet Cynical 