Customer Reviews

A False Sense of Well Being (Ballantine Reader's Circle)

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Now that I'm a retired teacher and a divorced man in my 50s, I'm always trying to read so-called "women's books" to find out what women really think about things. And, wow, is it enlightening!

A newspaper friend got an advance copy of this novel and passed it along to me. The book is a double pleasure (in addition to being an education for me) because it's so well written,wise,and witty. In this book the women are the ones in charge, whether they're misbehaving or just trying to figure out their lives. I laughed out loud at some scenes, & remembered some of my own lost loves in my youth. I'm telling all my friends and fellow readers about it.

OPRAH, take notice! This one will really strike a chord with women readers, even if it does leave some of us men scared and a little worried to find out what's really on the minds of our women friends.

I just loved this book from the first sentence, which is undoubtedly the best opening line ever, and it stayed wonderful all the way through. It is very much about matters close to the heart -- love, death, family, marriage, the grief of childlessness, a search for happiness -- but it's also down-right, laugh-out-loud funny. As a fan of Southern fiction, I really enjoyed how this book manages to be uniquely Southern and yet universal in its themes and characters at the same time. This is just an amazing book, but especially so from a first time author. I hope she writes many more equally wonderful books.

I was lucky enough to read an advance copy of this new novel and it's absolutely WONDERFUL! The characters are funny and smart, and Jessie Maddox's desperate search for "well being" in her life takes some poignant and hilarious turns. Since that first experience with this story, I took the novel with me on a weekend trip to visit my parents and read it again, and enjoyed it all the more, learning even more about these complex and well drawn characters.

Three cheers for this new voice in Southern fiction! I'm an aspiring writer myself, and so the blurbs by the novelists Kaye Gibbons, Lee Smith, Anne Siddons, Terry Kay and Mary Hood (and others) caught my attention immediately and told me this was going to be a great read -- and the book did not disappoint. This one's going to be a bestseller, I just know it. Now I can't wait for a sequel of some kind -- because I want to know where Jessie goes from here. But whatever this new writer turns out in the future, I'll be watching and waiting!

A native Southerner, I was so happy to read this new novel by a fellow Southerener -- and finally find a REAL Southern woman I can identify with. In so much Southern fiction these days (i.e. the books of Rebecca Wells) it seems like every character has to be so totally wacky & outrageous, almost to the point of parody. Believe it or not, not everybody in the South speaks in a thick drawl of an accent, and there actually are suburbs here as bland as where Jessie lives. She's self-absorbed, yes, but what woman isn't who's going through a mid-life crisis? Finding your true, authentic self is what it's all about, whether the search begins in adolescence or at midlife. That's what makes this book's theme universal -- not just for women, but for anyone doing some soul searching to determine what's really important in life. What I liked best about this novel was how it can make you laugh on one page and cry on another.

What an adventure this new novel is!! :-)

I just got this new book and once I started reading it, I couldn't put it down!! I'm now buying copies for all my girlfriends and demanding they read this book!!

Jessie's midlife crisis, and the trouble and boredom of her marriage to the straight-arrow banker Turner, is like a cross between something by Ann Tyler & Sex and the City, & a movie by the Coen brothers!! It's laugh out loud funny, but with real heart.

Buy this one ladies!! You won't regret it!! :-)

Some parts of this book are excellent . . . other parts disappointing, I'm thinking this is not going to be the author's best work but it is a good first novel. If you are a Southern woman, you'll recognize the mother in this novel -- I've heard the exact words coming out of her mouth plenty of times myself. The main character is a professional suburban woman, married to a banker, who is the middle of the realization that her life is empty and unsatisfying. The only change she can imagine is her husband's death. Most enjoyable part of the novel is when she goes home to rural Alabama -- her parents are the best drawn characters in the novel. The book meanders to a finish, with the main character never coming to any resolution of her malaise. The actions she took (setting the Green Duck free, etc.) were dramatic but seemed meaningless. I also felt it was a cop-out to discover, half way through the book, that she was recovering from the last of a series of miscarriages (as though to blame her unhappiness on being childless). The theme of her disconnection from her former life, in the rural community and church, was never fully developed. While I'm finding fault with the book, I still enjoyed reading it and plan to look for the author's future novels.

As much as I usually love Southern fiction, for some reason I was mostly disengaged by this novel that explores the fall out of love and mid-life crisis of the humorless Jessie Maddox. While the writing gave glimpses of southern charm, the story itself tettered between sadly funny, whiney, pompous and self absorbed. Many of the chapters begin with an excerpt from the Book of Common Prayer and the connection mostly eluded this reader who began to find it pointless and pretentious. Except for the wild night of the Green Duck, Jesse seemed elusive, out of touch, quick to judge and label, but lacking in some human way - not at all a mental health professional I'd particularly trust. The cookie cutter styrofoam homes of southern suburbia were interestingly empty shells, while the trailer courts and concrete block dwellings offered the real southern heartbeat. And the wedding of her sister on the Randolph County Fairgrounds was absolutely delightful. I was also enchanted by two absolutely lovely quotes on marriage: "Hell, love's the easy part. It's the rest of it that gets you in real trouble" and (from Jessie's daddy, the secret to a happy marriage: "I wake up every morning and your mother is there, same as always. I can deal with that. Most days, I even like it."

As a devoted reader of Rebecca Wells, Anne Rivers Siddons and Lee Smith, I'd like to see this writer abandon the prissy Jessie and really breathe some of that hot fierce air of the deep South into her next book.

This is a book for southern women who miss the south, and for those of us not from the south, but who moved there and were embraced by southern women. This book is an exclamation of our lives. We have a number of people to wonder about...the families we were born into and the ones we married into; the family member that we didn't choose, but have to live with; the friends that have brought us to a new understanding of family.

Braselton's book is well written and aptly titled.

...take this book to the beach if you're going on vacation this summer, because it's great and you'll really enjoy it. The book reminds me a lot of Ann Tyler's books, and I'm going to recommend it to my book club...Anybody who's been married a long time (me, 27 years!) can relate to the main character's problem, and knows ther's a fine line between love and hate sometimes. I wonder what this character would do if her boring husband really were to die like she thinks about, (i Don't want to give away the end either!). At first I thought this might be a murder mystery kind of story, but it'sa lot more than that, and a lot more fun. This character isn't exactly somebody i'd like to have as a therapist, because she's not very good at it, but it makes for a good read! enjoy ...

If you like Rebecca Wells' Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, chances are you'll also like this book! Although the character here, Jessie Maddox, lives in what she calls manicured suburbia -- which could be anywhere in the U.s. -- when she goes home for the weekdend to RandolphGap, Alabama, she meets a cast of characters (her family) as wacky as those in any fun Southern novel. Haunted by the ghost of her first "love," and later meeting his widow at a local bar, Jessie tries to figure out what's gone wrong in her marriage to the most "predictable man in the world", banker Turner Maddox. At midlife, she's missing passion in her life,and also still grieving after a miscarriage, and is trying to get that back in her life. Her wild sister Ellen isn't exactly as good example, since she's left her husband Cecil and is ready for a night of bar-hopping, and her best friend back home isn't really a good example either, since she's having a torrid affair with a young salesman. So JEssie returns to the Green Duck bar, a rowdy redneck bar, in search for happiness in a truly misguided way. Will she find it? That's the fun of this story. I was a little disappointed that I didn't get to find out much about what really is wrong with Jessie & her husband, but this is a great story anyway, and will keep you guessing till the end. Enjoy!