Chick-Litter

I'll Take What She Has: A Novel by Samantha Wilde
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I received an Advance Reading Copy of this book from NetGalley and Bantam Books, in return for an honest review.

I picked this up, as a change of pace, for a foray into Chic-Lit. I'm not really sure why I bothered. The story is told as a dual first-person narrative. We hear the voices of long-time friends Annie and Nora, across a year of their lives at Dixbie, a fictional Boarding School in the United States. Each woman alternates ownership of subsequent chapters, with often overlapping or intersecting time frames.

What cruelled this novel, for me at least, was the inability of the writing to absorb me, allow me to fully inhabit its world. I couldn't connect with the central protagonists, I didn't like them, but I didn't despise them either - they simply failed to engage my interest. It's funny, really, they should have. Both a little bit messed up, as we all are, by the traumas of growing up, they have relied on each other for support and validation for over twenty five years. They seek to balance life and expectations and family scenarios in a way that should have hoovered me right in.

But it didn't.

I think the work was just a little bit too preachy for me (no pun intended, given the author's stated occupation). There is no, one, right answer on how to be a mother or how to navigate the high and low points of marriage and love and the mundane dramas of everyday living. Choices, regrets, success, failure and simply treading water are all acceptable parts of the adult arsenal of coping with life. The repeated diatribe directed against working mothers just set my teeth on edge. We're not all cut out for nuclear parenting and not all non-parental child care is evil.

As chick-lit, this failed.

I kept reading it, I kept hoping. The writing style is easy, at times lyrical. Samantha Wilde can string words together in complex and interesting ways, but I think she could pay more attention to building up the layers of her characters - both male and female.



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