I disliked this book with a passion at odds with its fundamental silliness. The plot seems weighty: young woman diagnosed with rare, almost certainly fatal cancer on the same day her beloved husband tells her he's gay. Cue extreme crisis and self-examination. Instead, it's a flippant, frothy book filled with fake curse words-- e.g. "motherfudger"-- and childish repetition, in which virtually every character's voice/diction are the same underneath superficial, ludicrous differences. Though I woul

I disliked this book with a passion at odds with its fundamental silliness. The plot seems weighty: young woman diagnosed with rare, almost certainly fatal cancer on the same day her beloved husband tells her he's gay. Cue extreme crisis and self-examination. Instead, it's a flippant, frothy book filled with fake curse words-- e.g. "motherfudger"-- and childish repetition, in which virtually every character's voice/diction are the same underneath superficial, ludicrous differences. Though I wouldn't call the author talentless, I would certainly say that she was out of her league with these themes.



Some spoilers follow, if you care (which you shouldn't).



Issue 1: Our protagonist, Libby, is a horrible person that the story requires you to believe is sweet and sunshiney without showing you any evidence to that effect.

I'm really not sure why Pagan chose to frame this story as the tale of a woman with "rose-colored glasses" who finally gets a dose of reality. In every scene, to every person, Libby is snide, bitter, aggressive, and unfeelingly impulsive. Most obviously, she speaks of and to her husband-- the man she claims to have loved for 18 years-- so disgustingly that I became convinced that Pagan wrote in a Gay Best Friend/brother to sidestep criticisms that the book is anti-gay. Let's be clear: Tom (her husband) tells her he's confused about his sexuality and has been going to therapy, but he still loves her and wants to make the marriage work. He hasn't cheated on her, he doesn't have feelings for anyone else, and he hasn't slept with another man in his whole life. Would this be a huge, horrible, probably marriage-ending revelation? Sure. But our supposedly kind and sunny "heroine" responds by stabbing her disconsolate husband with a fork and throwing him out of their apartment. She then goes into all their joint bank accounts and empties them out, sells all his furniture, and puts their apartment up for sale ("The idea of Tom being homeless was appealing."). Her justification for this is that she makes more money than he does, and she paid the deposit on the apartment. Putting aside how revolting it is to treat your partner of 18 years this way for any reason, this raises a troubling gender double-standard: any housewife/mother would be entitled to a fair share after a divorce, but because he's a man who made less, he's weak and dependent and deserves homelessness.



But Libby doesn't stop there! She goes to the cafe they both frequent and tells the barista that Tom has a small penis. She tells neighbors that Tom is "trying to kill her," so they think he's abusive. She screams at him for being "a control freak" because he wants to talk to her in private about their marital problems. She wishes he had cancer. She explores at length his inadequacy as a lover and his poor response when she was struggling to conceive a child. She wonders if she "should've known" about his orientation because he was in the school play in high school, and by the end she can't even talk about him without calling him her "gay ex-husband" or her husband "who's attracted to men." Eventually she expresses gratitude to him because if he hadn't come out, she'd never have gone to Puerto Rico and had sex with a far superior lover.



In short, Libby's garbage personality and unrealistic, nasty responses to everything made it impossible to sympathize with her, and the book became a thankless trudge towards her supposedly-imminent death. The only thing that pleased me was that her character was so fake and flat that I can hope I never have to meet anyone like her.





Issue 2: The Under-the-Tuscan-Sun-meets-Eat-Pray-Love plot did absolutely nothing for me.

The book has taken on something serious-- namely, its protagonist has fatal cancer. But about a third of the way in, the author apparently decided that the story she'd set up was harsher or more difficult than the one she actually wanted to tell, so things abruptly morph into a half-baked romance novel. Libby goes to Puerto Rico and has multiple absurd brushes with death, but a wise old woman reads her palm and tells her she'll live long and prosper; then an attractive island pilot tells her it's "not her time," they have sex a bunch, they confess their love for each other, and she returns to the States to get cancer treatment. After some more waffling, she starts chemo, reunites with and marries her pilot, gets pregnant (turns out her infertility was small-penis Tom's fault too!), has twins, and tells us in the chirpy valedictorian-speech epilogue that she thinks she's going to live a plenty long life with a little more treatment. What an appallingly pat ending for a story with so much heart-twisting buildup. I was twitching as I turned the final pages.



The author's afterword tells us she wants to take her theme seriously due to her "many friends" with cancer, but this end product exploits about 8 million different real-life sources of grief: terminal illness, death of a parent, breakup/divorce, coming out to loved ones, infertility, panic attacks/anxiety, traumatic accidents (here, a plane crash), poor body image, etc. And for all this bombardment of Sad Serious Themes, we end up with an extremely ordinary story about a woman who went on a glamorous vacation to escape her woes and found a hot guy to save her from her malaise.



This book was free on Amazon, yet I still feel I paid too much.