Not much to say here. I think McFadden was going for Serial Mom (seriously great dark comedy starring Kathleen Turner) and then it just turned into a mess of a book that made zero sense. I think she also should have kept the focus on the married couple [Debbie and Cooper] and adding in another character’s point of view added nothing. I just thought by the time I got to the halfway point the book had firmly gone off the rails. We also get some sort of homage to Strangers on a Train and it just came out of nowhere. The ending was just….not great.
Dear Debbie follows stay at home housewife Debbie. She also does a “Dear Abby” type column in her hometown, but that’s more of a hobby than career. Debbie is dealing with a lot. She has her home ready to show off her garden for a magazine spread. She is being called into work about her column. She has book club with the neighborhood moms. And to top that off, her oldest daughter acts ashamed of her, her youngest is pulling away, and her husband seems to be hiding something. As Debbie day gets increasingly worse, we start to see that she’s hit her limit and that she’s going to start taking care of her and her family’s problems.
Debbie’s character never fully gets off the ground with me. I thought McFadden was going full camp with her and that was going great, but then there was too much happening there and we get a not great backstory about her past that I wish that McFadden had either left out, or developed that a bit more.
Cooper, same thing. We get something tossed at us and it doesn’t work if there’s no signs of what is to come. You are just tossing things at the readers and it feels very The Girl on the Train with me when you have authors purposely leaving things out to get to an ending just to pull a twist.
The flow of the book was working for me going back and forth between Debbie and Cooper. When we got the third character point of view it just didn’t work anymore.
The setting of the book is everytown USA per usual for McFadden.
The ending as I said just kind of happens. It just didn’t make a lot of sense and I just shook my head at the plot holes that are never explained and how I got a lot to say about how some characters have to be the dumbest people that ever lived.
