Oh no.
I feel terrible for saying this because I really love the 1st book so much, but this was just awful. Also this is not a romance, this is women’s fiction. And was not a great sequel to what came before. Next time readers may want to re-think begging an author for an update on characters they wrote from 20 years ago. I beg of you, just read book 1 and stop there. Following up with Carly Cooper 20 years later was a disappointment. Unlike with book 1, I didn’t laugh once. Most of the book read like a long line of misery. And Carly’s ending was not realistic and frankly boring. I wish that Low had her going on a whirlwind trip around the world again while her sons were gone. Have them gone for 8 weeks so she can follow her footsteps from 20 years ago so we can check in on everyone.
“What Now?” follows almost 50 year old Carly Cooper who is now estranged and almost divorced from the guy she chose in the last book. Dealing with him and her two sons being gone for 4 weeks, her friends drag her to LA to visit with one of her exes in some harebrained let’s help Carly get her groove back mess.
Carly is boring as anything in this. And I blame the plot. Just moving Cary to LA to visit Sam with her friends and aunt in tow was a terrible idea. One, it reminded me how much I didn’t like Sam in the first book. Two, and most important there’s nothing there. Just chapter headings with song titles .Also Carly has zero personality. And I don’t blame her marriage. Low didn’t give her anything to do but lust after an ex. And also I felt letdown by how we have a scene that shows she almost walked out on her marriage before for really stupid reasons. She’s fickle as shit and I was just done done.
None of the other women even felt like the same. And it felt like Low decided everyone had to just have terrible things happen to them. No spoilers, but at one point I went what’s next, locusts?
The dialogue is lackluster. The subplots were dumb. And the writing was tortured after a while.
The flow was pretty awful. I think if we had Carly just focusing on where she has been in the 20 years since she and the girls were all together that could have worked, but Low in several places just whole sale lifts parts of book #1 and puts them in this. I felt like I was in a bad case of deja-vu for most of my reading experience.
Also who Carly chooses made zero sense. Maybe if I hasn’t read book #1 right before this, but based on that it just didn’t work. I maybe laughed and sighed a few times. She shows her with her husband at points in time and honestly for her to do that and give us the is whatever ending was a head scratcher.
This just felt like a pale version of what I read before. Just a total disappointment.
I think what kills me is that Low had a pitch perfect plot for this, she could have had Carly retracing her footsteps from 20 years ago, going back to where she and her girls went on vacation, back to Amsterdam, Scotland, Ireland, Hong Kong, etc. She could have given us updates on the six men we got to know in book #1.
ETA: And another thing [redacted] is an emotional blackmailer and am surprised none of Cooper’s friends even saw that and called it out. That’s it. I see there’s a third book that just came out and I am going to hard pass on that one.
