Customer Reviews

Family Way

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is how I believe the author wrote this book:
a. interviewed a few medical students (surfed the internet and watched some B-rated movies)
b. talked to 2-3 women (including his mother and probably his wife)
c. put it all together into some really, really lame characters

The way the characters speak is so corny that I wondered if the author was being sarcastic - but he wasn't!!!
He was being a moralistic prick at best.

If you like these cliches, then by all means - read this crap:

women change after they have a baby and their husbands cheat (but only if they have been bad guys in the first place);

a career woman is bitter and angry because she's never had a family and now she is jealous of every other pregnant woman;

a bad man who cheats on his wife gets punished by losing his family;

an independent woman who left her children (in what didn't seem to me to be such a terrible situation - the father had money and the children had nannies) in the end is abandoned by all her children and will die of MS (how cruel of this author who is like what...a saint??!!);

everything in your childhood is a trauma (unless both of your parents were there to devote their entire lives to you and did that while holding each other's hands and cuddling)- I got so tired of Cat whining over her childhood (get over it already, it wasn't THAT bad)

a handsome surfer guy ends up being a cheater although he tries not to be;

the prettiest sister is like a really good wife and not at all aware of how beautiful she is;

and the most annoying thing of all - an ultimate happy ending for all the good guys and a punishment for all the bad guys.

COME ON! How pathetic!
Was this written for a 13 year old girl whose parents are still censoring what she is to know about real world?

But I give it 3 stars - because I did manage to finish it after all.

Very trite, forced and one dimensional. Bought book in $1 discount rack and felt relieved when I finished it.

I love Tony Parsons as a writer and I have read all of his previous books and finished this book in almost a day.
its a very emotionally book that deals with the beautiful thing called: pregnancy, having a child and living as a couple.
maybe the fact that I am pregnant at the moment and could easily relate to it and at some points I almost cried.... (really).
but.... there were some medical "facts" that were mistakable and that made the enjoyable reading being less enjoyable..
I loved it but it wasn't Parsons's best but still I recommend it to anyone who is expecting a baby, having a baby,planning to have one or just living with the great other...

This is a nice story, but not the best for Tony Parsons, I'd recommend Man and Boy and Man and Wife, they are deep and real, The Family Way is a little fabricated.

Whenever I start a book by Tony Parsons I know I'm in for a few late nights ... or even an all-nighter.

Parson's characters are extremely easy to get attached to - they are so "real" that you can project someone you know to almost every single one of them and you can't help but feel for them. Plus, no-one deals with the intricacies of family quite like Parsons.

This book focuses on three sisters: one is desperately trying to get pregnant, one finds herself accidentally pregnant following a one-night stand, while the third has decided that there's no room for a baby in her life ... but of course life is what happens to you while you're busy making plans!

Very few writers, especially male writers, write about (and for?) women quite so well. Parsons has a talent for exposing raw nerves and then applying soothing balm to them all in the space of a few pages, but in this book, I think he's a little too generous with the balm and the result is a slightly soppier and more sentimental than in some of his previous work. Though he never strays so far so as to lose touch with the `real' feeling you get from his work the way the book rounds up to a somewhat "they lived happily ever after" ending was a bit cornier than is usual for Parsons.