Book #5: "Something Borrowed" by Emily Giffin

I'm seriously annoyed that I spent $3 on this garbage.

Listen, I'll read trashy romance novels and enjoy them for the silly fluffhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif they are. I'll read the "diary" of a call-girl and forget about it as soon as I'm done. I'll walk away from a sappy Nicholas Sparks book understand why someone would read it and love it even if I didn't. But a book like this? It just makes me angry and resentful that I wasted my time and money on it. Because it's just crap. The fact that it was a best seller and that it got turned into a movie just pisses me off even more.

The story is stupidly basic. Rachel is turning 30. She's a lawyer in New York and though she has a pretty nice life, she does nothing but sit there and whine about it without bothering to do anything about it. Her best "friend" is an over-the-top attention whore named Darcy, who is engaged to the "perfect" guy, some boring pretty boy named Dex. On the night of Rachel's 30th birthday party, Darcy goes home and Rachel sleeps with Dex. Uh-oh. What to do? Tell Darcy? Not? Forget about it? WHO CARES.

See, some writers could do something with that story. Make it a real conflict, show us how the incident could drive apart Darcy and Rachel. The big problem here is that Giffin makes Rachel to be a completely insufferable character. She whines constantly. She resents Darcy for stealing her thunder at every turn since they first became friends in 3rd grade. But she's such a damned pushover that she has never said a single thing to Darcy that would make her stop acting that way. She does nothing about anything. She just whines, constantly.

This is how every single scene in the story plays out:

"I'm Rachel. I hate my cushy life, my job and my best friend. But everything would be so much better if I had a boyfriend! Darcy tried to get me to have fun last night, how dare she? We've been friends since the 3rd grade even though I totally hate her attention-whorey ways. In revenge, I'm gonna have sex with her completely bland fiance that I am inexplicably in love with (mostly because he's Darcy's boyfriend and he talked to me once), and not tell her about it. I am such a good friend, unlike that bitch, Darcy!"

Ta-da! Now you don't have to read it.

This book isn't just boring and generic, it's obnoxiously boring and generic. There are no high stakes for anything that happens. I didn't care about any of the characters or what happened to them. Rather, I wanted to take Rachel aside and shake some sense and gumption into her, because her endless whining was driving me insane.

Don't read this. Ever. Don't let your friends read it. It's obnoxious, insufferable, and will just make you angry. It's not even worth the clearance priced I paid on it.