Exes and Ohs by Beth Kendrick
Feb. 8th, 2006 07:41 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jmc_bksFinished reading Beth Kendrick’s Exes and Ohs, which I enjoyed. It is a 2005 chick lit book that, if I had read in time, would probably have given If Andy Warhol Had A Girlfriend serious competition for my vote for Best Chick Lit in the AAR poll.
Actually, the hook for me wasn’t even the back blurb, it was the tag line on the front: Mr. Perfect’s past is about to ruin her future.
Gwen first meets Alex Coughlin on a very bad day: she’s in rumpled track pants, running late for a meeting with her academic advisor, having just run into her ex-fiance, and she’s basically having a meltdown. In a fit of frustration, she tosses her uncharged cellphone into the street, where it is run over. Alex witnesses cellphone destruction and stops to talk to her. Turns out that he recognizes her from a trustee tour of the clinic in which she is doing research. After rescuing her from her meeting, they have a good first date. Because of the meltdown he witnessed, Gwen explains about the ex-fiance and the dumping; Alex tells her about his last serious relationship, with a soap opera actress that he was thinking about proposing to when he caught her cheating.
Alex is a financial analyst, a nice guy with a desire to have a Leave it to Beaver family: house in Colorado, SAHW, multiple children. While thinking his dreams are deluded and doomed to disaster, Gwen decides that he’ll be a good rebound guy. But after the first official date, it turns out that she can’t use him to erase her ex, because she likes Alex. Their relationship develops fairly rapidly, but it’s clear that they have a lot in common. Kendrick shows (not tells) this with the stuff they do together and with conversations about tv, humor and other things they have in common (or not).
Enter Harmony, mother of Leo, who turns out to be Alex’s ex. Leo is having some behavioral issues, so he’s getting therapy. In the course of taking the family history, etc., Gwen learns that Leo’s dad isn’t around - because Harmony never told Leo’s dad that she was pregnant and they broke up in an ugly way. Harmony is fairly flaky and belongs to a New Age Cult that among its other tenets, does take the family role seriously. So she decides that it is time to tell Leo’s father about him. You can see what’s coming, can’t you?
Alex does not take the news well at first. After getting over the shock, his immediate instinct is to Do The Right Thing, to attempt to make a family. Gwen, of course, has mixed emotions. As a child psychologist, she believes that a stable home and family is the best thing for Leo, but does it have to be with Alex? She turns Leo over to another psychologist and tries to take a step back from being involved in the Harmony-Leo-Alex family experiment.
Despite her attempt to step back from them, Harmony and Leo and Alex keep appearing in her life. Gwen can’t go forward and she can’t go back, and is back to feeling as bad or worse than when the ex-fiance dumped her.
I really liked that Kendrick’s characters seem real. They all have good qualities and bad, behave well sometimes and poorly other times. Leo is a normal 5 year old, neither angelic nor demonic. Gwen is a nice person, but she doesn’t let people walk all over her; her original goal with Alex and her treatment of another character, Paul, are not so admirable, but most of the time she has good intentions. Alex has valid reasons for his dreams of a perfect family, even if he is kind of selfish about Gwen's role in all of this. [Stay friends? Sure, he gets hot wife and cool-gal-pal on the side, while she's stuck mooning over a guy she can't have. Great for him but not good for Gwen at all.] Harmony really does want to be a good mom and build a family for Leo, even if she is shallow, vain, and self-centered. I had a hard time disliking her, although I wanted to because of something she did near the end of the book.
The pacing was very well done and no part of the book dragged. The plot of the book is over a fairly short period of time, and the pacing and tone matched the fast passage of time in the book. It was a fairly quick read. I liked Kendrick’s style/voice, so I’ll probably pick up her other book the next time I see it at the bookstore. And I liked that her message wasn't that you shouldn't try to Do The Right Thing, but that the Right Thing may not be what you think it is and may not be the traditional RT.
My only knocks: the Vegas interlude was not needed and was a little distracting; I get that Kendrick was using it as a mechanism for Gwen to be living alone and be okay with herself, but why not just have the roommate move out or get married? Why have all of these unrelated people show up in Vegas? It reminded me of an episode of Friends. The epilogue, while nice, was also unnecessary. I felt like the books could have ended without it and I would not have missed it. Second knock: the point of view is first person, but Gwen’s sudden acceptance of her life/situation was very abrupt, with little or no lead in or development. She goes from being miserable to being okay with everything without any reflection on screen, so to speak.
The back blurb is a little misleading because the ex-fiance makes only two brief appearances, once at the beginning and once near the end. He does want to get Gwen back, but that is a very small part of the plot.
All in all, a pretty good book, so EAO gets an A- from me.
Exit the groom...
Child psychologist Gwen Traynor has learned the hard way that "perfect" men aren't always what they seem. After being dumped the night before her wedding, she's understandably wary of diving back into the dating pool. But when she meets Alex Coughlin, she's convinced her luck is changing. He's smart, handsome, funny -- an ideal rebound guy. She doesn't intend to fall in love with him, but scintillating dates and mind-blowing physical chemistry have a way of winning a girl over.
Enter the ex...
Just as things are heating up with Alex, Gwen meets her newest patient -- a precocious preschooler whose chaotic soap opera-actress of a mother, Harmony, sounds an awful lot like one of Alex's crazy ex-girlfriends. Mostly because she is one of Alex's crazy ex-girlfriends. Unfortunately for Gwen, Harmony has a secret that plunges them all into a real-life daytime drama, complete with sex, lies, and Vegas elopements. With Harmony determined to reunite with Alex and Gwen's ex-fiancé begging for a second chance, only one thing is certain:
New loves and old flames are an explosive combination.
Actually, the hook for me wasn’t even the back blurb, it was the tag line on the front: Mr. Perfect’s past is about to ruin her future.
Gwen first meets Alex Coughlin on a very bad day: she’s in rumpled track pants, running late for a meeting with her academic advisor, having just run into her ex-fiance, and she’s basically having a meltdown. In a fit of frustration, she tosses her uncharged cellphone into the street, where it is run over. Alex witnesses cellphone destruction and stops to talk to her. Turns out that he recognizes her from a trustee tour of the clinic in which she is doing research. After rescuing her from her meeting, they have a good first date. Because of the meltdown he witnessed, Gwen explains about the ex-fiance and the dumping; Alex tells her about his last serious relationship, with a soap opera actress that he was thinking about proposing to when he caught her cheating.
Alex is a financial analyst, a nice guy with a desire to have a Leave it to Beaver family: house in Colorado, SAHW, multiple children. While thinking his dreams are deluded and doomed to disaster, Gwen decides that he’ll be a good rebound guy. But after the first official date, it turns out that she can’t use him to erase her ex, because she likes Alex. Their relationship develops fairly rapidly, but it’s clear that they have a lot in common. Kendrick shows (not tells) this with the stuff they do together and with conversations about tv, humor and other things they have in common (or not).
Enter Harmony, mother of Leo, who turns out to be Alex’s ex. Leo is having some behavioral issues, so he’s getting therapy. In the course of taking the family history, etc., Gwen learns that Leo’s dad isn’t around - because Harmony never told Leo’s dad that she was pregnant and they broke up in an ugly way. Harmony is fairly flaky and belongs to a New Age Cult that among its other tenets, does take the family role seriously. So she decides that it is time to tell Leo’s father about him. You can see what’s coming, can’t you?
Alex does not take the news well at first. After getting over the shock, his immediate instinct is to Do The Right Thing, to attempt to make a family. Gwen, of course, has mixed emotions. As a child psychologist, she believes that a stable home and family is the best thing for Leo, but does it have to be with Alex? She turns Leo over to another psychologist and tries to take a step back from being involved in the Harmony-Leo-Alex family experiment.
Despite her attempt to step back from them, Harmony and Leo and Alex keep appearing in her life. Gwen can’t go forward and she can’t go back, and is back to feeling as bad or worse than when the ex-fiance dumped her.
I really liked that Kendrick’s characters seem real. They all have good qualities and bad, behave well sometimes and poorly other times. Leo is a normal 5 year old, neither angelic nor demonic. Gwen is a nice person, but she doesn’t let people walk all over her; her original goal with Alex and her treatment of another character, Paul, are not so admirable, but most of the time she has good intentions. Alex has valid reasons for his dreams of a perfect family, even if he is kind of selfish about Gwen's role in all of this. [Stay friends? Sure, he gets hot wife and cool-gal-pal on the side, while she's stuck mooning over a guy she can't have. Great for him but not good for Gwen at all.] Harmony really does want to be a good mom and build a family for Leo, even if she is shallow, vain, and self-centered. I had a hard time disliking her, although I wanted to because of something she did near the end of the book.
The pacing was very well done and no part of the book dragged. The plot of the book is over a fairly short period of time, and the pacing and tone matched the fast passage of time in the book. It was a fairly quick read. I liked Kendrick’s style/voice, so I’ll probably pick up her other book the next time I see it at the bookstore. And I liked that her message wasn't that you shouldn't try to Do The Right Thing, but that the Right Thing may not be what you think it is and may not be the traditional RT.
My only knocks: the Vegas interlude was not needed and was a little distracting; I get that Kendrick was using it as a mechanism for Gwen to be living alone and be okay with herself, but why not just have the roommate move out or get married? Why have all of these unrelated people show up in Vegas? It reminded me of an episode of Friends. The epilogue, while nice, was also unnecessary. I felt like the books could have ended without it and I would not have missed it. Second knock: the point of view is first person, but Gwen’s sudden acceptance of her life/situation was very abrupt, with little or no lead in or development. She goes from being miserable to being okay with everything without any reflection on screen, so to speak.
The back blurb is a little misleading because the ex-fiance makes only two brief appearances, once at the beginning and once near the end. He does want to get Gwen back, but that is a very small part of the plot.
All in all, a pretty good book, so EAO gets an A- from me.
