Customer Reviews

Francesca's Party

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

 

 

Well, I picked this up initially because the blurb on the jacket said that it was like Maeve Binchy. Then I read the first few pages and I was hooked. Because of this book, I did not get anything else accomplished all day! I just lost myself in it, and that has not happened in a very long time. If you like Maeve Binchy, you will LOVE Patricia Scanlon. She writes very real, warm characters, and you can even sympathize with the "bad" ones because they are so well developed and have reasons for their actions. She takes a fairly simple story, that of a woman who after 20 years or so of marriage is shocked to the core to discover that her faithful husband is cheating. How she deals with this and grows over the course of the novel is told in a riveting way....she keeps the reader turning pages, and given that this is not a suspense story, she keeps the tension high, so that you just need to know what will happen next.

I will be trying to track down her other books now as I guess she is pretty big overseas, but virtually unknown here. I do not recommend authors lightly.....this is a great, warm pageturner....read this book!

I have to first say that I love Patricia Scanlan. I have been a fan since I first read City Girls a few years ago and I have read everything she has published since then. I love her work and her stories always hook me in immediately. This book was no different.

From reading the book jacket, you would think that this is your average, run of the mill, divorce story. Bitterness, fights, heatrbeak and trauma. But its much more than that. I think this story was oddly uplifting. A dependent woman learns to stand on her own two feet. She suffers a terrible tragedy but learns that she make something of herself. This is her chance to become the type of woman she always admired. There is lots of drama and heartbreak along the way, making this an inticing read. I definitly recommend it anyone, not just fans of Maeve Binchy. I think that Patricia Scanlan is in a category all her own!

It's a testament to the strength of Patricia Scanlan's writing that her readers, whether male or female, can empathise with her characters. In this tale of a betrayed wife, we meet a real woman: no Jackie Collins-esque maneater, but a real human being, complete with frailties, faults and vulnerablility. Scanlan manages to avoid the obvious trap of creating a cartoonish lothario in Mark and a martyred heroine in Francesca. Even "the other woman" is portrayed with depth and sensitivity. And that's what keeps you reading. You KNOW these people: you work with them, you live with them, you've grown up with them. You quite possibly might BE them.

This is old-fashioned story-telling at its best. No pretensions. No clever-cleverness. Something some of Ms. Scanlan's peers might care to note. In an age where there is a worrying return to the boorish objectification of women (check MTV, magazines and many youth-orientated TV dramas if you don't believe me), it is refreshing to presented with such a credible character in a book. Somewhere out there, there MUST be a TV producer who can recognise the excellent mini-series waiting within these pages. And when that is broadcast, perhaps Scanlan's wonderful "Promises, Promises" and "Mirror, Mirror" will be filmed too.

Francesca has always been the perfect mother and corporate wife, deferring to the males in her family in all things. Imagine her shock and surprise, when she discovers that her husband Mark is having an affair with a woman in his office. This book chronicles the various stages her emotions go through as a result of the affair--sadness, anger, and depression--before she decides that it's time to get on with her life. Scanlon's characters are wonderful--the selfish husband, the triumphant mistress, the concerned sons, the interfering mother--and the situations are funny without being over the top. She shows various incidents from different points of view which make them even more interesting. The transformation of the mousy Francesca to a woman of substance will have readers cheering.

The Good: The best part of this book is the outcome -- I enjoyed the ending. It's also an entertaining read, although a long one as you'll see below. The character development is excellent and the use of Irish vernacular is fun to read (since I'm an American). One of the more intriguing elements of this book is how the author managed to grey the lines of good guy/bad guy throughout the book. To some extent, she does a fabulous job of taking you on the roller coaster ride of emotions that would occur with this situation. The lengthiness of the tale affords her the ability to develop all the main characters extremely well and therefore manipulate your emotions and feelings for the various characters better than most authors.

The Bad: The book is perhaps a bit longer than it needs to be. Maybe it's because I don't have a lot of time to read and it took me 6 weeks or so to finally finish it, but it seemed to drag on quite a bit. I never got bored per se, but Francesca's party sure did seem a long time coming. There was also one character in particular, introduced late in the book, that seemed kind of unnecessary -- Ralph. A potential suitor for the now single Francesca that turns out to be a drunk. Don't worry, he ultimately checks into rehab, but I was left wondering why she bothered telling me -- he was essentially inconsequential and extraneous to the main story. Fortunately, all this was excusable and I did generally enjoy this book.

The Summary: Francesca Kirwan is a dutiful housewife and mother of two grown sons. She's also happily married to Mark Kirwan, a bank executive ... or is she? At the very beginning of the book, Francesca, through a chance sequence of events, finds out that her husband has been cheating on her for a year with a younger, beautiful up-and-coming executive at the bank where her husband works. The remainder of the book deals with Francesca's meltdown from the betrayal and her road to becoming a well-adjusted and happy single woman. There are plenty of bumps and bruises and pitfalls along the way, but all is well that ends well as they say.

In London Francesca Kirwan has spent more than half of her forty years contentedly married to Mark. Everything changes when she dropped off her husband at the airport so he can fly to the continent on business. Mark left his cell phone in the car so Francesca parks and enters the terminal to bring it to him. However, she sees Mark kissing a woman. Francesca learns that Mark has been having an affair with Nikki.

She kicks Mark out of their house so he blithely moves in with Nikki. At first Francesca expected Mark to beg her to allow him to return, but he never even plea bargains with her. Francesca begins to fall into a deep depression until her two adult sons and her sister try to help her become as an independent woman. A bit of revenge on her spoiled soiled Mark would sweeten her life immensely.

On the surface, Francesca's Party is like a zillion similar books starring a middle aged woman whose sheltered life crashes around her, but somehow out of the ruins she turns into super-person. Getting past the simplistic assumption that one is a better person following recovery from a traumatic event, readers will find this novel is quite amusing. The key to the story line is the effortlessly shifting of perspective between several characters (not just the title protagonist) so that the audience understands the same event from the different minds' eyes. This technique carried off quite smoothly shows that Patricia Scanlan is a very talented author whom entertains the sub-genre crowd with a strong contemporary character study.

Harriet Klausner

Francesca's Party is a great book to read on a rainy day. It pretty much follows Francesca through the final year of her marriage to big time banker, Mark Kirwan. She had the most seemingly perfect life, two loving grown sons, a rich husband with a comfortable marriage, living in a huge house in a swanky part of town. All was well until She saw her husband meeting another woman at the airport and not going on the "business" trip he was supposed to have been going on.

These events led Francesca to take her life into her own hands, and she created a whole new world for herself with some ups and downs along the way. I love reading about the cozy lives of people from Ireland and this book doesn't disappoint, I will definitely read more of Patricia Scanlan's books!

I found this book in the dresser drawer of an Irish B&B last week and took it, leaving behind a boring Fern Michaels book that didn't grab my interest. I'm SO GLAD I grabbed this book to read on the plane home! Francesca's Party is a delightfully fun "light read" and held my interest from one end of the Atlantic to the other. There was even plenty to read once I got back to Chicago. The three main characters, Francesca (the jilted wife), Mark (the cheating hubby), and Nikki (the other woman) are all very plausible. Scanlan gives great life to all three with her POV switches throughout the book. I was very pleased with the ending. More, please, Ms. Scanlan!

I liked this book and began to read her others. The only reason I didn't give it higher was because Francesca kind of got on my nerves in the beginning. I think we should have had more about her life afterwards. She moped just a bit too long but the ending was so satisfying that I forgave the moping.

When I picked up the book I thought yes this will be a great read as I had already read Foreign Affairs, however although I found the book good it was a tad disappointing as I was expecting it to be more than what it was. Also as the story just centred on Francesca although a heart warming story, I would have prefered more charcters to be involved than just Mark, Francesca, Nikki, Owen and Ralph. The novel was good though and it did have be hooked although it did seem to be a little dragged out but all in all a good read and I would recommend this book to any Partrica Scanlan fan and I am now goign to start reading Promises, Promises.