I read this with a buddy in my online book club, The Reading Cove.
Apart from having a decent opening, this story felt like a middle-aged man's wet dream. Very forced premise: a loner photographer, Robert Kincaid, gets lost on assignment, stops to ask for directions from a lonely, middle-aged housewife, Francesca Johnson, whose husband and children just happen to have just left her all alone for an entire week! So fate has them give in to an immediate and ill-fated attraction and they spend the next four days swimming in sap and having sex all over her poor husband's house.
I couldn't identify with this love story because it felt very contrived and underdeveloped. And I thought it was laughable that Francesca would leave such a detailed letter to her children for posterity. Didn't she have a friend or family member back home to spill her guts to? Would a woman really feel the need to inform her adult children in a post-mortem letter about exactly where in the house she'd had sex with a man she'd met 2.3 minutes ago? Please.
And some of the dialogue was so cheesy: "Robert, you're so powerful it's frightening" during sex had me laughing out loud to distraction!
At least the movie had Meryl and Clint in it, lol.
There must've been an awful lot of lonely housewives out there who bought this book to make it the bestselling hardcover novel of all time...but for me, it's a C-. I really wish I'd enjoyed it more.
Apart from having a decent opening, this story felt like a middle-aged man's wet dream. Very forced premise: a loner photographer, Robert Kincaid, gets lost on assignment, stops to ask for directions from a lonely, middle-aged housewife, Francesca Johnson, whose husband and children just happen to have just left her all alone for an entire week! So fate has them give in to an immediate and ill-fated attraction and they spend the next four days swimming in sap and having sex all over her poor husband's house.
I couldn't identify with this love story because it felt very contrived and underdeveloped. And I thought it was laughable that Francesca would leave such a detailed letter to her children for posterity. Didn't she have a friend or family member back home to spill her guts to? Would a woman really feel the need to inform her adult children in a post-mortem letter about exactly where in the house she'd had sex with a man she'd met 2.3 minutes ago? Please.
And some of the dialogue was so cheesy: "Robert, you're so powerful it's frightening" during sex had me laughing out loud to distraction!
At least the movie had Meryl and Clint in it, lol.
There must've been an awful lot of lonely housewives out there who bought this book to make it the bestselling hardcover novel of all time...but for me, it's a C-. I really wish I'd enjoyed it more.
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