Skip to main content

Review: Swapping Lives, by Jane Green


Swapping Lives is a story whose theme covers an often-discussed topic: what would it be like to step into the shoes of someone else?

Vicky is 35, has a job as Features Editor at Poise Magazine in London, and seems to have the perfect single life. Deep down, however, she's unhappy. She wants to be married, to have the comfort and safety of a large country home. On the other side of the pond is Amber, a housewife in Connecticuit who keeps being compared to the characters from Desperate Housewives. She's married to a Wall Street broker and has two children, and spends her free time doing events for the local Ladies' League. She also has a huge wardrobe full of designer clothes. Her life, too seems perfect.

But Amber is tired of keeping up with the Joneses, and wants to have a taste of what its like to be single again. And idea is hatched: Poise will hold a Life Swap, in which Vicky will switch lives with a housewife for a month. She'll wear the women's clothes and do all the tings the housewife would normally do. When none of the candidates from England proove to be acceptable, Vicky responds to a letter from Amber--and ends up falling in love, briefly, with the life she leads. Therein follows a string of interesting occurences in which Vicky tries to be the typical American housewife and mother and Amber attempts to live the life of a single woman in London--in the process fending off Vicky's old admirers.

This book had several major flaws. First of all, it took until more than halfway through the book for the swap to actually occur. Jane Green kept setting the mood for more than 200 pages, pages that could have been devoted more to the experiences the women have when they switch. Also, Vicky and Amber decide, after all of this and only two weeks in their new lives, to switch back again! After all the energy that was put into building the characters, there's this anticlimax that is disappointing. The subject of this book is rehashed material and the ending is predictable; the women find that they prefer their own lives, after all. Jane Green should stick to writing about single girls--even though, as a mother of four, I suspect that getting into that mindset would be difficult. However, Green's earlier books were much more fun to read.

Comments

Anonymous said…
I wil have to check this out-thanks!
Have you reviewed Princess Bubble? Being a single girl, I love this book!

Popular posts from this blog

Another giveaway

This time, the publicist at WW Norton sent me two copies of The Glass of Time , by Michael Cox--so I'm giving away the second copy. Cox is the author of The Meaning of Night, and this book is the follow-up to that. Leave a comment here to enter to win it! The deadline is next Sunday, 10/5/08.

A giveaway winner, and another giveaway

The winner of the Girl in a Blue Dress contest is... Anna, of Diary of An Eccentric ! My new contest is for a copy of The Shape of Mercy , by Susan Meissner. According to Publisher's Weekly : Meissner's newest novel is potentially life-changing, the kind of inspirational fiction that prompts readers to call up old friends, lost loves or fallen-away family members to tell them that all is forgiven and that life is too short for holding grudges. Achingly romantic, the novel features the legacy of Mercy Hayworth—a young woman convicted during the Salem witch trials—whose words reach out from the past to forever transform the lives of two present-day women. These book lovers—Abigail Boyles, elderly, bitter and frail, and Lauren Lars Durough, wealthy, earnest and young—become unlikely friends, drawn together over the untimely death of Mercy, whose precious diary is all that remains of her too short life. And what a diary! Mercy's words not only beguile but help Abigail and Lars...

Review: The Piano Teacher, by Janice Y.K. Lee

The Piano Teacher is a complicated novel. On the surface, it’s about a love affair between two British ex-patriots in Hong Kong in 1952-3. Claire Pendleton comes to Hong Kong with her husband Martin at a time when the world is still recovering from WWII; Claire takes up work as a piano teacher for the daughter of a wealthy Chinese family, where she meets Will Truesdale, the Chens’ enigmatic chauffeur. The book jumps back in time between the 1950s and the beginning of WWII, when Will is interned in Stanley, a Hong Kong camp for enemies of Japan. On “the outside” is Tudy Liang, Will’s beautiful Eurasian lover. There’s no doubt that Lee’s writing is beautiful. But there’s something lacking in this short, terse novel that I can’t quite put my finger on. First, I think it’s the tenses she uses when taking about each story: that which is set in the 1950s is in the past tense, while the war scenes are talked about in the present tense (confusing, no?) The interpersonal relationships of the m...