Customer Reviews

Me Times Three

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(15)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(15)
1 star:		(30)

 

 

I would have expected a LOT more from this writer. There is not a single developed character in the book, and no one that the reader really cares about. The premise -- finding out your great love is engaged to three people -- never really gets adequately explored. It just sort of happens, and while unhappiness is reported, it's never really real. Bridget Jones -- which is the obvious genre Witchell wants to work in -- had the advantage of having a likeable main character to whom the reader could warm up and with whom the reader could identify. Here, neither the writing nor the story are at all compelling. Like many of the post-BJ novels, it's just a not-very-interesting story about a girl who gets dumped and then finds a new guy. Also, it's pretty clear to anyone who knows where Witchell worked in the 90's (Mirabella) that she's trying to settle some score with the then-editor in chief of that magazine. Her flat portrait of her apparent nemesis betrays Witchell's basic inability to get anywhere below the surface of things.

I wanted to like this book, but it simply bored me. Perhaps one had to be of that time and that place (New York in the 1980's) to get thrills out of the supposed true-to-life aspects of this book. But I don't see the appeal to the more average reader. I read a lot, and I have read a lot of similar books, but I just didn't get why this one was hyped, or even published. And did anyone else think the "good guy" with whom the protagonist ends up was an anal, selfish creep? I got to the end of this book and saw that the publishing house carefully informed us who the author's husband was, and thought: A-HA. That's why it's getting decent reviews. Fear of Frank Rich.

I debated writing a review of this book because I didn't want to be mean, but in the end I thought if I could spare one reader the agony of trying to read it I would have done the public a service. Sandra is the least likable character I have encountered in a novel in a long while. In fact, I wanted to kick her in the kneecaps everytime she opened her mouth, which was, of course, often as she is the main character. Sadly, I think Witchell's intention was for us to sympathize with her, which I most certainly did not. She brought new meaning to the words self-obsessed and shallow. (And just because it was set in the late 80s is not an excuse). I bought the book because I found the concept of her finacee being engaged to two other woman interesting and thought it would be highly entertaining to read how that would play out. That did not happen. Bucky was little more than yet another thing for her to whine about. She even managed to turn her best friend's illness into her own melodrama. I love an easy-read summer beach book just as much as the next girl, but this one was just not worth the extreme effort it took to read it.

Don't believe the blurbs on the back of this book. The glowing praise from other writers kept me reading this novel, thinking at some point the book would develop at least one of the following: interesting characters, an intriguing plot, a sharp social commentary or graceful writing. Sadly, the book delivered none of the above. If you want to save your time for a novel worth reading, skip this. The writing is full of cliches, the characters are about as deep and realistic as a stack of paper dolls and the plot is drearily ho-hum. Would this gotten such good reviews -- or have even been published -- if the writer weren't a well known New York Times journalist? I doubt it.

Despite its bright yellow cover, Me Times Three is not a cheery book. I was expecting a fluffy romantic comedy and instead found a darker, more thoughtful novel. Me Times Three documents approximately one year in the life of New York fashion magazine minion, Sandra Berlin, as she discovers that her boyfriend of 9 years is engaged to not one, not two, but three women. A small consolation is that she is one of those women. Although the jacket cover implies that this is a book about a jilted single women dating, it is more about Sandra's relationships with just a few people whom she has known for a long time. Among them are Paul, her best friend, and Bucky, the ex-fiance. I thought Witchel did a great job showing where Paul and Bucky's lives intersected with Sandra's and how those intersections define Sandra's life, but not Paul or Bucky's.

The narrative is sprinkled with charming "fairy tales", but this is not a whimsical book in the Bridget Jones fashion nor is it tender like The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. I thought it was most akin to A Girl's Guide to Hunting and Fishing in its tone.

The main character, Sandra Berlin, finds out that her fiance (and high school sweetheart) is engaged to not one but two other women. The rest of the book is about Sandra trying to find herself with the help of bad dates, her gay best friend Paul Romano (who contracts AIDS), and an office full of friends who all seem to use cocaine. The book is set in Manhattan, in the 80's. The use of that decade didn't make much sense beside the cocaine use (even though it is probably wider used today) and the lack of knowledge about AIDS. The books was slow paced and often-times choppy because the use of transitions was pretty weak. There seemed to be a lot of unneeded material. Paul was such a wonderful character, though. He added life and sense into his best friend's life. He is, by far, the funniest character in the book. His trials in life really did a lot to salvage the book for Witchel. As for Sandra, herself, she is supposedly supposed to be a really smart person. The author mentions this fact many times, but doesn't do much to highlight this characteristic. In fact, she seems to shadow her intelligence by giving Sandra a career as an Arts and Entertainment editor, when she actually doesn't know much about the subject. Most of the trouble with this book was bad editing. The story should have been spiced up and smoother.

This book is the weakest incarnation yet of the currently popular "hip girl, lives in NYC, works in publishing, seeks husband" genre. The heroine's self-loathing is only topped by the hatred she feels toward all other women, or at least those she considers competition. And the worst is, it's not even CLEVER... I was rooting for the cheating ex-boyfriend by page 50, I'd drop this loser for the nearest cocktail waitress too....

I am a sucker for the "single-girl-dealing-with-love-and-career-in-the-city" genre, so I snatched this one up. I should have been alerted by the blurbs in the back - one by Sarah Jessica Parker. I love "Sex and the City", but Ms. Parker is not exactly who pops in my mind as an authority on literary masterpieces. Given the reputation of the writer, I would have expected blurbs from other writers with much clout.

The forays into fairy tales were boring. I read the first couple, then outright skipped the rest. The rest of the story was extremely predictible. Once Alex bothered to introduce the character of Mark Lewis as someone who described Sandra as "cute", you knew they would end up together. Too bad you had to wait another 150 pages for it to happen. Her gay best friend contracted AIDs, which should have come to the surprise of exactly nobody. You have the stereotypical gay man in the 80s who uses lots of drugs and engages in promiscuous sex. I wish that Alex would have explored their relationship a little bit more or focused a little bit more on how Sandra would deal with the illness of her best friend rather than relying on the repetitive Paul went out and got laid and trashed scenarios.

But what irritated me more than anything was that Bucky was engaged to three women at the same time, and she just walks off and never talks to him! I didn't get the impression that Sandra was the sort of girl who would walk away without answers. How long did he think he'd pull it off? What was he planning on doing when his women all started pushing for wedding dates? How did he explain the whole situation to family and friends? Not everyone would have condoned it like his friends at the Met did. The whole incident seemed so contrived. I'm guessing that the author had written herself into a corner with this plotline, and didn't know the answer to any of these questions either. So the simple solution was to not address them.

In conclusion, it is a simple read, and it will hold your attention for a little while. I was really skimming the last 75 pages of this book. It had gotten too thick and dull. In the long run, there are much better "single-girl-dealing-with-love-and-career-in-the-city" to waste the day with that won't leave you feeling as if you had just read an incomplete story.

I read this book because it seemed like it had so much potential to be a great story. However, that potential disappeared by the end of the first chapter.

Sandy is a New York Jewish girl still dating her high school WASP boyfriend. A week after they get engaged, she learns he's already engaged to TWO other women.

From then on, Sandy tries to put her life back together, but as the book continues, it seemed to me that she was never happy being with Bucky (the ex-fiancee and what kind of a name is that) in the first place. Then there's her gay friend, Paul, who lied to her during their entire friendship and she finds out while he is dying of AIDS. Then there's her job at Jolie!, a fashion magazine and the trials she endures there with her co-workers.

I think Alex tried to tell three stories in one book, which made the novel very confusing and didn't do justic to any of the stories. I kept reading the book because I thought it would get better, but it didn't.

Me Times Three should've really been titled Incomplete Stories Times Three.

This is a terrible, terrible pile of words masquerading as a novel. It's almost like a satire of the entire genre: 'sassy' protagonist, self-loathing at her core and angry at all other (attractive) women and (uninterested) men. Ms. Witchel should stick to her nasty newspaper profiles and essays and stay away from fiction. She brings nothing but sad ... and clunky writing to the genre.