Life Swap [Paperback]

Jane Green (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: Penguin (2005)
• ISBN-10: 0718148053
• ISBN-13: 978-0718148058
• ASIN: B001KTD31I
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (94 customer reviews)

More About the Author

Jane Green is a bestselling author of popular novels. She has been featured in People, Newsweek, USA Today, Glamour, and Cosmopolitan. She lives in Connecticut with her family.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Disappointing, August 17, 2006

By 

K. Huff (Radnor, PA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Swapping Lives (Hardcover)

Swapping Lives is a story whose theme covers an often-discussed topic: what would it be like to step into the shoes of someone else?

Vicky is 35, has a job as Features Editor at Poise Magazine in London, and seems to have the perfect single life. Deep down, however, she's unhappy. She wants to be married, to have the comfort and safety of a large country home.

On the other side of the pond is Amber, a housewife in Connecticuit who keeps being compared to the characters from Desperate Housewives. She's married to a Wall Street broker and has two children, and spends her free time doing events for the local Ladies' League. She also has a huge wardrobe full of designer clothes. Her life, too seems perfect. But Amber is tired of keeping up with the Joneses, and wants to have a taste of what its like to be single again.

And idea is hatched: Poise will hold a Life Swap, in which Vicky will switch lives with a housewife for a month. She'll wear the women's clothes and do all the tings the housewife would normally do. When none of the candidates from England proove to be acceptable, Vicky responds to a letter from Amber--and ends up falling in love, briefly, with the life she leads. Therein follows a string of interesting occurences in which Vicky tries to be the typical American housewife and mother and Amber attempts to live the life of a single woman in London--in the process fending off Vicky's old admirers.

This book had several major flaws. First of all, it took until more than halfway through the book for the swap to actually occur. Jane Green kept setting the mood for more than 200 pages, pages that could have been devoted more to the experiences the women have when they switch. Also, Vicky and Amber decide, after all of this and only two weeks in their new lives, to switch back again! After all the energy that was put into building the characters, there's this anticlimax that is disappointing. The subject of this book is rehashed material and the ending is predictable; the women find that they prefer their own lives, after all. Jane Green should stick to writing about single girls--even though, as a mother of four, I suspect that getting into that mindset would be difficult. However, Green's earlier books were much more fun to read.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Okay but pretty cliched, May 14, 2008

By 

Bookphile (USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Swapping Lives (Hardcover)

This novel had some moments that were greatly entertaining and even interesting at times. The photo of the author on the jacket made me think that she has some personal experience with the "Desperate Housewives" lifestyle. Still, it's a lifestyle that has really been done to death and I found it a bit far-fetched that in her quest to experience the married with children life, Vicky chose Amber's. If Vicky really wanted an accurate picture of married with children life, shouldn't she have chosen a household that was rather more middle class, where the kids weren't being raised by a nanny and where the mother wasn't out buying designer bag after designer bag? How much reality can anyone get from that sort of lifestyle? This particular plot thread was complicated by the fact that the author seems to be condemning the lifestyle but not entirely. While criticizing it, she's also glorifying it. The author really only skims the surface with this issue and I think she'd have been better served if she'd delved a bit deeper and gave some more insight into what made these women behave the way they were.

This goes doubly for Amber. The character was a prime opportunity for Green to dissect what goes on in the head of a woman caught up in this lifestyle but she pretty much throws the opportunity away. Amber felt pretty two-dimensional to me in general. She was symbolic of the woman who comes from nothing, marries for money, and then loses herself in the competition to prove that she is more affluent than the rest, but that's it. The reader never gets a real feel for what's going on in Amber's head, of what her hopes and dreams once were. Green makes her seem mercenary when describing how Amber pursued her husband but then tries to soften this so that Amber doesn't totally sound like a gold digger. It's not really effective and to me it didn't make sense, given that Amber was supposedly ambitious and had her own successful career.

As for Vicky, I also found her to be a rather stereotypical character. The clubbing, drinking single girl really has been done to death and it would have been nice to see a character who broke out of this mold a bit. I could understand Vicky's worry that she would be alone for the rest of her life but she mostly came across as desperate. She was also very judgmental when it came to men and I didn't think this was entirely realistic for a woman who is supposedly so consumed with worry about not finding a mate for life.

All in all, this novel was a pretty typical work of chick lit and I found that disappointing. I read Jemima J several years ago and really liked how Green got into the head of her character. I don't think I'll be in a rush to read more from the author.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Don't put this in your shopping cart!, August 24, 2006

By 

Amy Leo! "Amy" (Haverford, PA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Swapping Lives (Hardcover)

I was so looking forward to this book, like I look forward to all of Jane Green's books. Sadly however, the book is not nearly as good as the summary provided by Amazon. None of the characters really pulled you in, the first 150 pages just rambled on and on about how their lives appeared to be golden but so many things were missing - a man (seriously, come on) for the British swap and an actual grasp on reality for the American Swap. We are literally forced to listen to the main characters complain on and on and on... It gave me a headache.

Put this book back on the shelf, unclick it from your shopping, cart, return it to the library, save your self some time, and read Baby Proof or Something Borrowed/Something Blue.

And you, Jane Green, start writing witty novels again!