The Red Book in Ultimate Popsugar Reading Challenge

Jun 05, 2013 Mandy rated it it was ok · review of another edition

At first, I thought 'Ooh, I quite liked this' but the more it sat with me, the angrier I got about it. A strange reaction perhaps, but I felt disappointed by the predictability of the plot.

The red book of the title refers to the red book that is sent out before every Harvard reunion, filled with everyone's updates for the past five years. Every entry includes the basic stats: name, address, contact, spouse/kids etc, as well as a little paragraph or two explaining where they're at. Considering th At first, I thought 'Ooh, I quite liked this' but the more it sat with me, the angrier I got about it. A strange reaction perhaps, but I felt disappointed by the predictability of the plot.

The red book of the title refers to the red book that is sent out before every Harvard reunion, filled with everyone's updates for the past five years. Every entry includes the basic stats: name, address, contact, spouse/kids etc, as well as a little paragraph or two explaining where they're at. Considering that this happens every five years, some of the entries seemed really detailed, which is more for our benefit than realism. This is the first hint that this is more 'women's fiction' than literary fiction. It's neat and tidy, with no surprises and everything spelled out for the reader.

The story itself follows a group of friends and hangers-on from the 1989 class - Mia (now married to Jonathan, a famous director and fabulously wealthy, or so we are led to believe), Jane (amazingly naive for a journalist based in Paris with a child), Clover (desperate for a child and married to a younger man who we never actually meet), and Addison (a closet lesbian married to a dreadful man with three awful kids). They've kept in touch over the years and yet this reunion weekend seems to be a catalyst for everything changing in their lives. How convenient!

Each chapter is told from a different point of view, which can end up being really disjointed, while at the same time, the signposts to the action and plot are very obvious. For example, Jane holds her adoptive parents and her first husband on a pedestal, believing that none of them every cheated or made any mistakes in their lives and so she judges her new partner for his mistake and everyone else as well. Well, shock! horror! when she discovers that she was wrong, they weren't perfect, and she forgives everyone. How neat and tidy. And don't get me started on Addison and Gunner's marriage - the typical bad marriage with no redeeming qualities at all, which only serves to highlight how she should have stayed with her lesbian girlfriend instead - the girlfriend who is amazing and perfect, of course.

And when the supposedly SHOCKING twist at the end comes and a character dies, it was bloody obvious the whole way through and especially as you start reading that chapter. I ended up skimming it just to get to the point. And this is where the book should have ended if it had any allusions of being literary fiction. But no, Kogan can't help herself and she includes the Red Book entries for all the characters for the next reunion, nicely summing up what happened to everyone. Wouldn't you know it, they all ended up with the people they should have, doing what they love (except for Mia, who had it good initially) and everything turned out right. There's no mystery, there's no space for the reader to imagine anything.

Still, the book gets 2 stars, since it's well-written and the characters, while being pretty cliche, are consistent and well-characterised generally (it's only the supporting cast that are entirely one-dimensional). I didn't hate it while I was reading it but, considering I found it via the Women's Prize for Fiction shortlist, I had higher expectations. ...more

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Apr 30, 2012 Christina, Join Me on Storygraph! rated it it was amazing

Shelves: books-i-recommend, 2012

I read this book in a weekend.

Like many of the main characters in this book, I'm a well educated (though certainly not Harvard educated) woman struggling with motherhood and self... being a grown up though feeling like a college kid, chasing dreams.

So you can imagine how hard it is for me to find time to read a whole novel in a weekend.

It was that good. There were characters I loved, there were characters I disliked, there were characters who surprised me. The story was intensely readable, comp ...more

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