The Protagonist: Rachel White. She's always come in second place after her hotter, luckier, more successful best friend Darcy, and for years she's been convinced that that's just her lot in life...The Rub: ... until she sleeps with and falls in love with her best friend's fiance, Dex, and she starts to rethink just how unfun it is to live in her best friend's shadow.
The Supporting Cast:
Dexter: Darcy's fiance, and a former lawschool chum of Rachel's. Obviously likes Rachel, but it hesitant to end his seven-year (!) relationship with Darcy. Still - why not bang them both to help him decide?
Darcy: Rachel's lifelong bestie - who's presented as a shrill, superficial, selfish, grasping adulterous attention whore who basically deserves to be cheated on. I guess.
Ethan: Rachel's platonic male friend living in Britain. Believed to be gay by Darcy because he wouldn't sleep with her. Nursing his own heartbreak.
Marcus: Dex's slacker best bud. Charming and easygoing - Rachel sporadically dates him in an attempt to get over/cover up her affair with Dex.
Hillary: Rachel's much healthier friend, who happens to not Be a Slutty Pirate Hooker like Darcy.
The Word: The line - although Something Borrowed never quite crosses it, it tap dances along it so often that it's hard not to hate it, even when it never quite shifts into completely terrible.
Something Borrowed says it's about exploring love and female friendships, when really it's about toxic friendships, jealousy, bitterness, and adultery. It really isn't the chic little chicklit novel it appears to be.
Rachel White is our novel's
Now, I understand where the novel is trying to go with this - examining the things that hold friendship together and where romantic relationships fit in and which relationships should be more important. I understand it's trying to examine the morality of adultery and whether it's better to go after the one you love or remain with the one you're committed to even if emotionally you're not.
But most of this message is scrubbed away by the depiction of Darcy. Right after the hook-up, Rachel gives us a long and detailed info-dump on her past which obviously depicts Darcy as a Boyfriend Stealing, Attention Whoring, Lazy, Directionless, Too Beautiful to Live Shrew Who Just Gets Everything So Easily.
The moral quandary really goes out the window when the book almost outright tells you that Darcy deserves to have her fiance cheat on her because she's a giant selfish bitch.
And on top of that we have a heroine who is very difficult to sympathize with. The novel isn't badly written, and we do understand Rachel and where she comes from and how her past has shaped her into the person she is, but I found it so difficult to truly enjoy the adventures of a woman who is so envious and passive.
That's what I mean by the line - Rachel is a well developed and understandable character, but it's still painful and boring to watch her whining about how Darcy always won this and Darcy always was better at that and everyone loves Darcy but not me boo hoo hoo. It's equally tedious reading how much she enjoys being with Dex but how for the vast majority of the book she can't bring herself to tell Darcy or even encourage Dex to break his engagement because of her low self esteem. I spent most of the book wanting to tell Rachel to get over herself, already.
Again, though, the book is well-written with some nice turns of phrase, and I enjoy the majority of the supporting cast, but I just couldn't get behind Rachel. No matter how well-written, a novel about a woman wringing her hands for 200 pages is still a book about a woman wringing her hands for 200 pages and I'd rather read anything else.
C
6 comments:
I think what saved this book for me was the fact that nobody is really spared. Darcy is manipulative, Rachel is an insecure cheat, and Dex is an indecisive one. They are all flawed characters. It wasn't easy to sympathize with any of them, really.
However, I think Griffin does an excellent job of depicting her characters while using the 1st person POV. And in the end because nobody is really spared by the writer (primary or secondary characters alike), to a certain extent the story succeeds.
I actually knew someone similar to Darcy on the selfishness and not noticing/caring what her friends were going through front. I think this probably affected my reading because I could believe in Darcy's character. I really enjoyed where the author went with her in the second book too.
I really struggled with this first book because I didn't find any of the characters to be likeable at all.
Interestingly I still read Something Blue (it's an illness, I can't help but not read a connected book) and I found it to be a much better book.
"No matter how well-written, a novel about a woman wringing her hands for 200 pages is still a book about a woman wringing her hands for 200 pages and I'd rather read anything else."
LOL - I tend to not read "chic lit" for this very reason.
For some reason, the most of the heroines I've come across seem to mostly passive whiners who miraculously come out on top? And 90% of the book we get to hear how their relatively normal middle-class life is so hard to bear? Say what?
I read a review of Bridget Jones Diary that suggested the Darcy in that book had somehow how ended up with Kitty rather than Elizabeth. (The book is tentatively based on Pride and Prejudice.)
And it's so true. :) I don't see how Bridget Jones does anything at age 60 but fret about her wrinkles *and* her weight.
@Janicu - We've all known a Darcy or 2 or 3. They totally exist. What you do is find new friends instead of pine away in the background at age *30*.
It's Rachel's reaction to the situation that's so problematic. It works in high school when you're trapped with your companions. A decade and a half later, you need to move on because hey, that option is open to you. Unless it's for work/survival, not voluntarily hanging around jerks is one of the many joys of adulthood.
Great review! I agree with some of the points. The book is very well-written. There were times when Rachel was so insecure that I wanted to yell at her, but I like that the author didn't turn her into some paragon of perfection or something.
I have to agree with Hilcia when it comes to her take on the characters.
Ugh. Will avoid this book. I will happily sacrifice realism (if the argument for these characters is that they are realistic) any day of the week for characters that I can actually like.
That's why I read genre fiction, after all, instead of lit-tra-cha. I wanna enjoy myself.
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