I have to be honest. I hated this book. It was like a car accident. The subject matter was awful but awful is part of life and I was intrigued by this awful so I read. And the first third or so wasn't too bad. It was pretty much what I expected but it just got more and more where I was just skimming parts in disbelief that the protagonist and the author had teamed up and thought well we gave it our best shot so lets try to get over 300 pages and call it a day.
Carmen is a woman who didn't want to be married but she got married. She had a kind of life where she drifted and didn't want to go home and took the better of two shitty choices all the time. She ends up going abroad and meeting a guy that she spills coffee on and he's this brainiac guy and she's not attracted to him but she sort of forces it as he's loaded and his mother is nice enough and she'll be set if she marries him so she does. And then regrets it. In fact she wishes the guy dead for the entire time they're married. The book opens up with Jobe, her husband on his deathbed riddled with cancer. He dies. She should rejoice and get on with her life that includes their three children and her lover on the side who is also married, but she doesn't.
The book is just a chronicle of the aftermath of his death and how she feels about and the past, how they met and the early years of their marriage, and also how she is diagnosed with breast cancer and now she thinks it is some sort of karmic thing. Then the oldest son who has down's syndrome talks to his dead father but that part never goes anywhere and we just witness Carmen's thoughts about life without her husband and then coming across some papers that Jobe was working on (he was a mathematician working on some unsolvable problem) and basically...... It all doesn't make me want to care one bit. I wanted to like Carmen at least a little bit. I mean there are people out there who question why they married the person they did and they meditate on it and maybe they've done some crappy things in their life that they think would warrant some sort of karmic kick in the arse but this book just took a nose dive from I'm-sure-it-could-have-been-handled-differently-if-written-differently but it just went phhhhhhht right back to the library where it came from. I was very happy to wrap it back up with the nifty tag and rubber bands and shoved into the tub so it can make its merry way back to the the library whence it came from. I returned that book with as much attitude as anyone could without looking like a lunatic.
I do not recommend this book. At. All.
But the one I'm reading now- 4 thumbs up!!!!
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