Goodnight Nobody

Kate Klein never thought she would end up like this - perpetually falling short of the cookie-cutter mom image in picture-perfect Upchurch, Connecticut; spending her days schlepping her three kids under 5 to and from school and play dates; living with a kind but frequently absent husband Ben; and quietly going crazy from the tedium.[return:][return:]Everything changes when she discovered Kitty Cavanaugh, the most perfect mom of them all, face down in her kitchen with a butcher knife between her shoulder blades. The suburban police are moving too slowly for her liking, so Kate takes it on herself to investigate the murder.[return:][return:]She is assisted by Janie, her wacky best friend and heiress of a carpet mogul, and her first love Evan McKenna, whom she haven t seen since that disastrous one-night stand that virtually send her running into the arms of the man who became her husband.[return:][return:]Kate s status with the other Stepford mommies improved, since she was the one who discovered the body. They grudgingly accepted Kate into their little clique, allowing her to question them about the woman she barely knew.[return:][return:]Jennifer Weiner attempts a murder mystery for the first time after a series of more chick lit samplings. Her books do mark a certain period in her real life to some extent - she was single when she wrote Good in Bed (a story about a single plus-size woman trying to love herself and find love), but she has since progressed on to write about married-with-kids characters, which I no longer identify with.[return:][return:]Perhaps this is why I wasn t very taken with this book. The flashback scenes of how she met Janie and Evan were what we ve come to expect from Weiner, but the book soon became all about Kate tracing the footsteps of Kitty Cavanaugh and her investigation.[return:][return:]Kitty s double life. Kitty s search for her real father. Kitty s lecherous husband Phillip. In the end, the whole thing feels like a huge red herring. Thank goodness for Janie, I say.[return:]return:

picked this up on a whim and really enjoyed it. character driven mystery about the anxieties and insecurities of a particular type of suburban motherhood! i think the lead char, Kate, is really well drawn. some of the secondary/tertiary characters get a little less plausible, but it all holds together. ambiguous ending that really landed for me. good stuff for real!

A murder mystery. Quite a departure from her usual fare and it shows. There's still the complicated mother/daughter relationship, feelings of inadequacies, the slightly overweight female character, the good looking and fearless best friend...but there was something missing. The like-ability of the main character maybe? Even now, having just finished the book 5 minutes ago I couldn't remember the name of the main character!

Kate. She wasn't believable, she wasn't fully fleshed out. She lost her mind over this man she never had a relationship with and married the first man who came along after. Then she complains about being dissatisfied. She goes off half cocked every time she gets just a tiny idea of something and it's wrong. Every. Time.

But what more than that, I never felt like she loved her kids or her husband. Or even Evan, the one that got away. She just wanted to do whatever she wanted to do and damn all to everyone else.

Alone, it's not a horrible book, but compared to In Her Shoes or Good in Bed this was entirely lackluster.