If You Lived Here, You'd Be Home Now (2010) - Plot & Excerpts
It's hard to like a main character who is a single mom, 25 years old, lives with her well-off parents who pay for everything - including her son's 20k tuition to a private elementary school - and acts like a complete brat. It's hard, but stick with this book anyways. The plot really isn't solid in action, it's a lot of "delayed coming of age" lessons. The characters are borderline cheesy with a fake sugary dialogue, but stick with this book anyways. Really, it's an emotional treat for mothers and daughters about where home is and how we leave those we love. I grabbed this book at random from the library because I wanted to branch out from my usual tastes (pretentious classic literature) and read something completely different. Though I enjoy tales of falling in love, obviously, this book wasn't quite written for me but despite not being the target audience, I enjoyed the main character, Rickie, and this made the process of reading considerably easier. I felt that the writer wasn't afraid to make Rickie unlikable and hopelessly flawed at times, and I had to respect that. Naturally, I enjoyed her more because of those flaws. Not much to say about the other characters. Her sister was wonderful and boring. Her mother was some kind of irritable generic mom. They served their purpose, but nothing more.Her love interest was your typical wonderful man, and being a man myself, I found it hard to believe any man could be so wonderful. It is possible to write a romance without the man being a beautiful snore, just look at Jane Eyre for an example. Maybe women are so starved of good men these days they've been forced to turn to literature like this where they can at least dream up a man who fifty percent of them wouldn't end up divorcing. That being said, I found the tension between them to be fairly well executed but the pay off in the end was a bit weak. Essentially, "Welp! Here we are finally -- in love on the beach, just like the reader always expected us to be!" The writer has them say "Hi" to each other a lot during their first night, which I guess is kind of cute, but at the same time felt more like she had no idea how to write the scene. Though the Scrabble to love-making transition was well done. What else to say? The book has a story that moves quickly and it was sort of fun to read about some stupid brat getting their life in order, especially since mine is such a mess. Random Side-note: After finishing this book I started on Miss Lonelyhearts. Talk about a breath of fresh air.
What do You think about If You Lived Here, You'd Be Home Now (2010)?
I needed a brain break - read this book. It was alright.
—Lphaure
Decent enough. Your run of the mill fun romance novel.
—sshakir222
