This is a really disappointing review to write. Usually I'm super excited and I have a cell phone jam packed with little notes I took as I read. This book, The Last Original Wife, was my first original letdown. It's written by a woman who has a really long name - it sounds impressive but her writing falls flat. Her name is Dorothea Benton Frank.
The Last Original Wife has a cover that just screams "summer!" which is part of why I bought it. I figured it would be a great book to read in-between my "Game of Thrones" series, and it would be a great end to my too short summer. As you may or may not know I started teaching again this week. This book was a horrible respite from my first week of my second year of teaching fifth grade.
This book is about a woman named Les married to a man named Wes. Yes, that's right. Their names rhyme. Wesley and Leslie. Ick. I was able to look past this unfortunate choice of character pairings and attempted to get into the book which starts out with Les in the waiting room of a very prestigious therapist's office. We don't know quite why she's there, but we can guess. Her husband is a jerk. As the book progresses her husband is beyond a jerk, he's ... truly terrible. A horrible man. Unfortunately he's so horrible that it's almost hard to believe. He left her behind in Scotland and she fell into a manhole and broke a bunch of stuff, then he ditched her at the hospital to go play golf and sent his friend's young woman (who she hates of course) to watch over her. This is only a sliver of what this man has done to his wife. Much more crap comes on later. Unbelievable crap.
Don't read this book unless you're really bored and there's literally nothing else on your shelves to pick up. The women feel demoralizing (as they should), the men are pompous idiots, the kids take advantage of their moms, and Les escapes her husband to go live with her gay brother and his pampered dog (who yes, wears clothes). Oh there's also a thing about ghosts in the house that make them sandwiches and fold their clothes ....... yup. The dialogue is bad, and when Wesley has his own chapters from his point of view they're completely ridiculous and unbelievable. In fact, they're annoying. It's a weak story and I'd consider calling it "old lady fiction" geared toward old ladies who don't have the ability to read good and challenging stories. The book is slow. I mean Fifty Shades of Grey wasn't exactly a literary masterpiece but it made women happy and it was definitely entertaining. This is just ... lackluster at best. I'm diving back into the George R.R. Martin books, and I'm on the third installment - A Storm of Swords. I know it'll be good because I loved the first two - and it's 1,000 + pages so it might take me a while to finish now that school has started.
Keep reading folks, just not The Last Original Wife. The best written part of the whole thing was this little tidbit that I think we can all commiserate with, "there was nothing on earth that could surpass the value of camaraderie between women, especially women in crisis." This book put me in a crisis - I skimmed the epilogue just to get it over with faster.
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