REVIEW: FALLING APART IN ONE PIECE

falling apart in one piece -  one optimist's journey through the hell of divorce
by Stacy Morrison
(Pages 239)
Release date:  March 24th

First of all, thank you to Michelle at Simon and Schuster Canada for sending me an ARC of this book!

This is a story about Morrison's journey through divorce.  She is the successful editor-in-chief of Redbook Magazine, but even while she is soaring in the publishing world her personal life is doing a severe nosedive with no ejection seat in sight.  One day out of the blue her husband announces that he is leaving her and that he can't stand living with her, and he then moves out and leaves her and her infant son to deal with the crumbling house and flooding basement.

Okay, if I'm going to be honest here, I would say that this is not a book that I'm going to rave about.  Stacy Morrison is a good writer, and I thoroughly enjoyed her writing style.  And the first part of the book where she describes her idyllic home life and the details of the day her husband suddenly tells her he is leaving her, are all beautifully written.   And the rest of the book really has its moments, but it's a lot of the same stuff just retold.  I have personally been through a divorce, I had no kids at the time, so I could relate to much of what Morrison was saying.  Especially the part where she was getting super pissed off that people wanted her to whittle down the reason for her divorce into a short concise message.  I used to say after my divorce, that it was not something a person could just summarize in one sentence.  And this is what Morrison was saying.  And she also points out that when people are asking that they aren't necessarily asking about you, they are asking, "do I see myself in here?  Is MY marriage okay?".  The one thing I will say that is a big positive about Morrison's book is that she definately can look long and hard at herself and at a situation and be brutally honest.  I appreciated all of her soul searching as I have been there myself.

Now, the thing I didn't like about it was that Morrison seems like an energy vampire.  You know what I mean?  There are some people in life that seem to suck the energy from people they are near, and I sensed that even from her writing.  I could be way off, but at the very least her book sucked the ever living life right out of me.  About 1/2 way through I was thinking to myself, "Girl, get a therapist!"  And then not one page later did she say that she had already been seeing a shrink for the past decade.  The majority of the book was very draining to read.  Like that person in your life that always has the same problems for years and obsessively talks about the same things over and over until they have finally driven their last friend away with their continuous woes.  I felt a huge amount of relief when I reached the end!  So sad, really.  This is the only reason I am rating it a "2".  Otherwise it would have probably been a "3", but I just could not deny the fact that it was completely exhausting to read.  I think people who have been through divorce will, at the very least, be able to really relate to everything she went through on the outside and more importantly the journey into herself.  It goes to show that divorce does not care if you are a successful business woman hobb knobbing with celebrities, it will still kick your ass just as hard as someone who works at a convenience store.... to that end we are all very much made of the same stuff...fragile and yet with powerful wings to lift us up out of our own misery --- God willing.

RATING:  2/5

MAILBOX MONDAY

For the last two weeks I have been extremely busy with work and my daughter's 10th birthday shinanigans.  Now that things are back to normal, I can concentrate on book blogging... which I have MISSED! 

First I want to send a HUGE THANK YOU to Michelle at Simon and Schuster Canada for sending me these ARC's!!!!  You are awesome!

So, in my mailbox today from a week or so ago

The 13th Hour by Richard Doetsch

This is an ARC, and I was pretty pumped when I read the premise, it sounds very cool!  It comes out December 29th.

Here's the blurb from Amazon.ca:

A mesmerizing thriller -- told in reverse! The 13th Hour is the story of a man given the chance to go back in time in one-hour increments to prevent a vicious crime from destroying his life.

Nick Quinn is being held in jail, accused of the murder of his beloved wife, Julia. He knows she's dead; he saw her bloody corpse, shot in the head at point-blank range. The police tell him they found the murder weapon with his fingerprints on it in the trunk of his car. Nick is confused, grief-stricken -- and completely innocent.

At 9 p.m. on July 28, a gray-haired gentleman visits Nick in the police interrogation room and asks him a simple question: "If you could get out of here, if you could save her, would you?" He hands Nick a golden talisman that allows Nick to go back in time, one hour at a time, for a total of twelve hours. With each hour that Nick travels back, he finds more clues to the identity of Julia's real killer, but he also discovers that his actions in the past may have unexpected repercussions in the future.

In his race against time to save the woman he loves most in the world, Nick will find that friends become enemies, old loyalties are tested, and Julia's murder is part of a larger scheme that has its roots in greed and vengeance. Nick has the ability to save Julia, the chance to put his own world in balance, but he is venturing down a precarious route. If he hasn't set things right by the thirteenth hour, his desperate attempts to save Julia's life may lead to a far greater catastrophe than he could have ever imagined.

A surprising and utterly original thriller, The 13th Hour is pure page-turning suspense -- full of double crosses, cliffhangers, and shocking revelations.
 

And an ARC of "Gone" by Lisa McMann, which will be released  Feb 9, 2010.  This is YA and looks pretty interesting.  It is the third book that follows the main character Janie, but it is not a trilogy.  I think it's more of a series.Here's the blurb from the authors website:

Janie thought she knew what her future held. And she thought she'd made her peace with it. But she can't handle dragging Cabel down with her.


She knows he will stay with her, despite what she sees in his dreams. He's amazing. And she's a train wreck. Janie sees only one way to give him the life he deserves--she has to disappear. And it's going to kill them both.

Then a stranger enters her life--and everything unravels. The future Janie once faced now has an ominous twist, and her choices are more dire than she'd ever thought possible. She alone must decide between the lesser of two evils. And time is running out...

And the third one is an ARC called "falling apart in one piece - one optimist's journey through the hell of divorce"  by Stacy Morrison.  (Release date:  March 2010) (no cover image available)  Here's the blurb on the back cover:

Just when Stacy Morrison thought she had it all, her husband of ten years announced that he wanted a divorce.  She was left alone with a new house that needed lots of work, a new baby who needed lots of attention, and a new job in the high pressured world of New York publishing.  Told with humor and heart, her honest and intimate account of the stress of being a working mother while trying to make sense of her unraveling marriange offers unexpected lessons of love, forgiveness, and dignity that will resonate with women everywhere.