Honeymoon: A Romantic Rampage [Hardcover]

Amy Jenkins (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 2000

Honey is a girl on the verge of getting married, even though she still carries a torch for Alex, the Love Of Her Life, someone with whom she spent only one night. A perfect night. A soul mate night. A night that makes her glow when she tells the story. Now, seven years later, she's been ambushed by Ed, a suitable young man so nice and kind there's nothing to do but to marry him - so she does. But on her wedding night, Honey walks onto the balcony of her New York hotel suite, and there, on the neighboring bridal suite balcony, is Alex.

Weaving four people, two couples, two honeymoons, and one true love, Honeymoon is heart-wrenching and hilarious.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Like her spiritual sister, Bridget Jones, Honey is a single Londoner with a taste for unattainable men, funky outfits, and a self-deprecating sense of humor. Unlike B.J., however, Honey's saga of self-realization starts off with her engagement to a wonderfully sweet and likeable fiancé, Ed. On her "hen night," the British version of a bachelorette party, her girlfriends ask her to retell the story of the night she met the love of her life, and Honey begins to describe her first meeting with a man who is definitely not Ed.

Actually, the love of her life happens to be a Hollywood film-writer named Alex who she met in a restaurant seven years earlier. After a perfect night of soul-mating, a dash to the airport, and a postal strike, Alex was never heard from again, leaving Honey just enough rope to hang herself on what ifs until Ed came along. Now, with the wedding plans rolling, Alex surfaces again, and Honey struggles to match fantasy and reality and find the true love of her life.

Though Honeymoon can feel distastefully coy in its moments of self-consciously produced stream-of-thought sequences, author Amy Jenkins mixes in enough humor and romantic suspense to make the reader swallow it. Honey is entertaining, if not always likeable, and the cast of eccentric friends will make you smile as you flip through the pages as fast as your fingers allow. --Nancy R.E. O'Brien

From Booklist

This entertaining novel opens with 28-year-old Honey regaling her bachelorette party with the details of how she met the Love of Her Life, who happens to not be Ed, the man she is soon to marry. Honey has long wondered what happened to her Love, Alex, with whom she spent one magical night talking in London before he returned to his Los Angeles home, never to be heard from again. Honey and Ed marry and spend their wedding night at a posh hotel in New York. In a small fit of frustration, Honey steps out onto her balcony and--lo and behold--who should be on the neighboring balcony but Alex, on his own honeymoon. Residual sparks fly between them, and the scene for a madcap adventure is set. Although this book is an amusing page-turner, Jenkins has created a complex character in Honey, a woman who is torn between fairy-tale ideals and real-life romance and drolly questions the modern--and often terribly unsatisfactory--quest for a lifetime partner who must be the embodiment of perfection. Kristin Kloberdanz
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Little Brown and Company (September 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0316655708
• ISBN-13: 978-0316655705
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #7,117,171 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Fluffed, August 26, 2000

By 

Mr. K. Mahoney "Kevin Mahoney" (Punked Books, London, UK) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Honeymoon: A Romantic Rampage (Hardcover)

Amy Jenkins created and wrote 'This Life' for BBC2, which was an incredibly intelligent and compulsive piece of viewing. On hearing that Jenkins has written a novel, you immediately picture a huge Dickensian affair of modern London life with multiple characters. Instead of this, we get 'Honeymoon'.

'Honeymoon' is the narrator, and you can't help but groan as soon as you hear her name. One of the most attractive things about 'This Life' was its ensemble cast of men and women. Here you only get Honey as a first person narrator, and you immediately feel bereft. Yep, the portraits of men in 'Honeymoon' are okay, but you don't really get any deep insights into any of the characters. Jenkins is scrupulously fair, mentioning that in the majority of marriage break-ups, it's the women who have walked out. But this is as about as close to real life, or any life, as 'Honeymoon' gets.

Take 'Mac', for example, Honey's boss. He's something big in Hollywood, we're told. But we never really get to see what he does, apart from paying airfares at propitious moments (a lot of the events in the novel seem dependent on the old-fashioned device of Providence). Because Honey is so shallow, you never really get to care about her, despite her sob story of being orphaned when young. Ed, her groom to be, is so anonymous that he could be Anyman. There is the odd bit of humour, but never really enough to make the novel sparkle. Ed is right when he observes that Honey is far from reaching the heights in the hilarity stakes. Everything about this novel is so... comfortable. Honey and Ed arrive in New York by accident en route to their Honeymoon, and Ed thinks nothing about abandoning their reservations in Mexico to stay in Manhattan. Poor little rich kids, you sigh. Even their best friends and employer turn up in New York. Later on, when Honey has to agonise about returning to England... the fact that she does have such a coterie really renders this dramatic choice meaningless.

There are moments of high drama that ultimately fail to get your pulse racing. Jenkins refers to a lot of Cult TV and movies (with Honey ultimately losing all credibility when she claims that Roger Moore was the best Bond), and maybe reading novels is not her first choice of recreation. But you still feel she could have produced something much more meaty than this. The main story is really too girlie to have any great appeal. On the back cover, the legend is 'Fiction: General' which just about sums it up...

13 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars DON'T BOTHER!, August 28, 2000

By 

karen (Kansas City, MO, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Honeymoon: A Romantic Rampage (Hardcover)

Looking for a lighthearted romantic romp a la Bridget Jones? Well, you won't find it here. Amy Jenkins' debut novel, "Honeymoon," is as unsatisfying as stale wedding cake. I was attracted to this book because of its description on the dustjacket. Well, I should have stopped there- that's the best part of the book. Ms. Jenkins falls into one of the most dangerous traps in modern fiction- trying to create "extra" characters, when all we really care about are Honey, the woman caught between Ed, the nice guy, and Alex, a mysterious bad boy she spent a life-changing evening with 7 years earlier. But, unfortunately, we meet Ven, Honey's younger sister, who is boringly beautiful and vacant, Della, a cliched party girl, Theresa, the token Happily Married Woman, and Mac, the yuppie. For a better read about wedding day jitters, try Suzanne Finnamore's "Otherwise Engaged."

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars More than just fluff ..., May 10, 2001

By 

Katie (Nashville, TN) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Honeymoon: A Romantic Rampage (Hardcover)

I didn't expect much more than a quick, entertaining read from this book, but when it was over, I found I had a lot to think about. If you can stay with the book through the end (and I agree that it includes some rather implausible moments), it's really worth it. Jenkins raises some really interesting questions about the concept of soulmates. I found myself thinking about these questions long after I'd finished the book. If nothing else, read it for an inventive take on love and destiny.