Book of the Week: Heart of the Matter

Infidelty seems to be a theme of many of Emily Giffin's novels and Heart of the Matter is no different, however, I think the book can be best characterized as a portrait of a marriage. Stay-at-home mom Tessa struggles with wanting to be there for her young family and her choice to give up a career she loves to facilitate that. The book opens with Tessa and her husband Nick, a handsome and very successful pediatric plastic surgeon, celebrating their wedding anniversary. Before dinner is through Nick's called back to the hospital for an emergency. He forgot to switch his on-call shift. Tessa would recall it as the night everything changed.

But was it? Perhaps the trouble had started much earlier. While quite predictable the book does attempt to delve into the different reasons why marriages falter, why couples fall apart. Tessa struggles with not being the perfect wife and mother, even with more time on her hands, and has to contend with her own mother's dire warnings still ringing in her ears--that soon her husband will get bored of her, that by abandoning her career Tessa will no longer be the woman that Nick fell in love with.

Without giving away too much of the plot (not that it's exactly filled with mystery) Tessa soon finds herself in the exact place her mother warned her about. Alternating Tessa's point of view with that of Valerie Anderson, an often disappointed single mother and lawyer struggling to do right by her son Charlie, Giffin presents a story of "good people caught in untenable circumstances."

Some of the questions this book raises are interesting, like how different people react to a cheating spouse and the different reasons that relationships reach that point, and what happens when good people do bad things (another Giffin staple). When I read or hear stories like this I often wonder what I would do, always coming to the same conclusion. I don't know what I would do...no way to know, I figure, until you've walked that particular path.

Heart of the Matter wasn't a bad book, but it felt like there was something missing, something preventing me from getting lost in the story. It all seemed a bit too pat, too formulaic and didn't have me engrossed like some of Giffin's earlier works such as Something Borrowed (I will admit I'm looking forward to that movie, although I'm not sure how I feel about Hilary Swank as Rachel, and I was happy to see cameos by Dex and Rachel in Heart of the Matter). Despite all this I will say that Giffin does chick lit quite well and always leaves me with something to think about when I've read the last word.

Have you read Heart of the Matter or one of the other Emily Giffin books? What did you think?

Book of the Week: Baby Proof

I hope you all had a wonderful time celebrating the New Year!  Our weekend away was just what the doctor ordered (not literally, but you know what I mean...)  I even managed to squeeze in my reading - I've been pretty good at keeping up my at-least-one-book-a-week rate.  And while I'm no reviewer I thought it would be nice to share one of the books I've read every week here.

I read Emily Giffin’s debut novel, Something Borrowed, its sequel, Something Blue, and Love The One You're With, awhile back and enjoyed them. (Apparently Hilary Swank's production company has purchased the rights to the first two books). Somehow I didn’t think to read Baby Proof until recently. This book is similar to the others in style, but I enjoyed that it tackled something not often touched in chick lit – children and the women who don't want them.
 

I think there is still something very taboo about a woman who is absolutely sure she doesn’t want children.  I can imagine that for such a woman finding a mate, and constantly having the need to justify their lifestyle, can be both tiresome and frustrating. This is where Giffin’s heroine, Claudia Parr, finds herself at the beginning of the novel. Intelligent and successful Claudia is also dead certain she doesn’t want to be a mother. When she meets Ben and they hit it off right away she counts herself lucky. When Ben announces on their first date he doesn’t want children either Claudia knows she’s met her match.

Unfortunately for Claudia, a few years into their seemingly perfect marriage Ben decides he does want children after all, and that's when everything falls apart.  Baby Proof is about all that follows this fateful turn of events.  I enjoyed this novel, the only thing that didn’t ring true to me was how quickly both Claudia and Ben gave up on their love. As in life there are no easy answers in this book—like who is to blame for the break up, if anyone—but it would have been nice for Claudia and Ben to search a bit more for some solutions before giving up on what was, by all accounts, a happy marriage.



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