I read this book because I am a die-hard Jennie Cruisie fan and the plot-synopsis looked like it had great potential. It was a disappointing read for me. I found it unfulfilling, and annoying. There were a few good parts, but the story itself was missing huge obvious chunks in the backstory and motivation of the characters. The romances were not satisfying and the men seemed to me to be very 2-dimensional.

If it were up to me, I’d tell the authors…”Nice try, that was a good start. Now go back and re-do it and flesh out the plot and characters into something worth putting on my keeper shelf.”

the triumph of three good young women over one bad aging woman

This crops up in several Crusie novels. Clea in Faking It, Phinn’s mother in Welcome to Temptation, Brenda in Agnes and the Hitman…. She doesn’t always do it, but when she does, they’re horribly shallow, aging ungracefully, power-mad women who just don’t make reasonable villains to me. Megalomania and vanity work as the villain’s motivation in a comic strip, but it’s disappointing in a Crusie novel because I find her non-villain characters so much more persuasive.

That said, I did enjoy Agnes. Releasing Unfortunate MFs and Agnes so close together makes for some interesting comparisons–Agnes reads much more like Crusie’s classic thickly-layered novels that I love. (And the villain turns out to have a reasonable motive in the end. I’d have liked to see that developed earlier, as I spent half the book wondering if there was a point to all the hostility. But it did come together.)