I love humorous, breezy chick lit. Books of implausibly normal girls with normal bodies falling love with improbably wonderful guys.
I did not love this book.
In fact, I pretty much LOATHED this book.
The protagonist is a 26 year old kindergarten teacher named Moxie. She is a size 16, and while she is quite comfortable with her size, it has always been an issue with her cartoonishly manipulative step-mother.
The book opens with Moxie having sex with a guy she doesn’t like after a lousy first date in which he took her to Chili’s. She describes his apartment as “looking like someone vomited up a dorm room” and his sheets as “slimy”. So why is Moxie having sex with him? Well, she’s horny. “However, being that I hadn’t had sex in a while, I figured this was a chance to feed the angry beaver.”
Angry beaver. Let that sink in a minute. Has any woman EVER called her vagina an “angry beaver”? She refers to it by a number of cringeworthy terms, some like “pocket” “cooch” are familiar. Others are more inventive, like “Bat Cave” (with cobwebs!) and “Pound Puppy.”
While telling her best friend about this date, Moxie gets drunk, something she does regularly throughout the book. She sees an extremely good looking man, asks him if he shaves his testicles, then throws up on his feet.
As you might expect, coincidences drive this plot, and Moxie soon meets the mystery man, Miles, again. He is the widowed father of a new student in her kindergarten class. Miles apparently has no qualms with leaving his son in the care of a teacher who has publicly demonstrated spectacularly poor judgement.
This brings me to yet another gripe with this book. Moxie is a TERRIBLE teacher. The kind of teacher who has oral sex in a tent on school camp out. The kind of teacher who appears at breakfast wearing Daddy’s t-shirt and sweatpants. When a student she dislikes asks her if it is a myth that your tongue will freeze to metal in the Chicago winter, Moxie teaches her the word “hypothesis” and tells her to test it.
Given the frequency they run into one another, you would think Chicago has a population of about 300. Coincidences abound. She runs into Miles at social events, on dates, in bars and parks. Once she even runs into him while she’s on a date with another guy. She then proceeds to throw up on him again.
They get together long enough for some torrid sex, then have a falling out, probably because the book didn’t have enough words and needed a couple more chapters. Their friends intervene and hatch a needlessly elaborate scheme to get them back together via online dating.
I honestly don’t understand all the love for this book, based on the Amazon reviews. I will say the dialog was snappy and often humorous, but not enough to make it worth the time.
