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
