Customer Reviews

Woman Walks Into a Bar (Quick Reads)

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With the title being Woman Walks into a Bar, I was kind of expecting a comedy since walks into a bar preceded by various occupations, animals and so forth is a pretty common standard basic opening joke line. Woman Walks into a Bar isn't a comedy though, instead it's a very predictable weak Bridget Jones Diary type short story with a lot less likable and intelligent main character that reinforces the most men are sleazebags type image in the dating world that some readers may be after.

The basic plot of this short story is a 28 year old woman who was bullied as a child, then got pregnant in her mid teens to a violent man more than ten years older than her who she was in love with. Sam is being urged to find a man, by her now teenage daughter Beth. Beth spends her time leaving corny old jokes posted around the house to try and cheer up her depressed mother and creating an online persona on a dating site for her. Besides Beth, the only thing Sam has to look forward to in life is the Friday girls' night outs she spends at the local bar with her supermarket colleagues where she can fantasize about a relationship with the barman that in her mind, will cure all her problems. Only this Friday those so called supermarket friends have a change of plan, they've told Sam that they've set her up on a blind date. With disastrous internet set up dates in her recent memory (which you'll read through flashbacks), Sam really doesn't like this set up at all. However being that she hasn't stood up to bullies her whole life, there's no standing up to her colleagues and getting out of this blind date.

What lets this story down is the sheer predictability of everything that happens. You can see the cheesy ending, work out what will happen on the dates including the main upcoming one, and everything else pretty much as soon as they're suggested. Also with Sam being a fairly stupid and such as mentally weak person, you not really hoping she'll be successful and can quite understand men not being interested in her. Plus the story plays on the negative stereotypes that men are really only interested in dating to get between the sheets with all men becoming verbally nasty after she doesn't agree to their taking the dates to the next step. The best written parts are the school days flashbacks scenes, maybe the story should have simply kept time wise to the school days era and tried to be a getting over bullying or even giving those bullies their comeuppance style read.

It is part of the Quick Reads series of books to increase literacy levels by encouraging those who don't like to read beyond magazines and comic books to try fiction through cheap priced short story length fiction and non fiction. The problem though is I don't think those reading this will be encouraged to pick up a another book. There's some really good short stories in the Quick Reads series, this just isn't one of those.

...I say surprisingly because I thought I'd given up on shallow chick-lit type books. You know the type, there's 3/4 friends: The mad one, the quiet one, the firey one the normal sisterly one etc. Also there's the big bad world of men out there, split into 2/3 factions: the tall darcy-like handsome ones, the little geeks, the liars, the friendly fatherly types etc. Anyway enough of them. This book does have the similarities- internet dating in this case but still relative strangers. Our heroine (Sam)is a single mum who's been dateless for a few years and some very, I think, strongly written flashbacks show the reader what has created the character that is a loser with men. This was the core of the book, the reasons behind Sams character. This was refreshing and thought provoking. As a male reader I appreciated the thought and care behind all this. Even now I wonder how the author was able to do so much with such a small book under a "Quick Read" banner. What stops it getting the full five stars from me are of course the cliched 'Chicklit' stuff that I've already mentioned, the annoying daughter, and that I found the ending was a little too twee. But I had a much better evening reading this than watching the **** on the telly.