Title: Love Rehab: a novel in twelve steps
Author: Jo Piazza
Publisher: Open Road
Rating: worthy!
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration of any kind for this review. Since this is a new novel, this review is shorter so as not to rob the writer of her story, but even so, it will probably still be more detailed than you'll typically find elsewhere!
Editing notes:
P 25 "So you listen to Dixie Chicks on repeat sober..." Needs a comma in there somewhere! It took me three reads to get it.
p104 There's some weird formatting by the Rule 7 text!
Love rehab is a very short novel (~140 pages) which took a bit of getting into. Frankly my initial feeling when I started reading this was that this was "chick-humor" which I wouldn’t appreciate (not that I'm a big fan of guy humor either. I prefer my humor gender-neutral!), or that it was a kind of feminine humor that you need two X chromosomes to really get/appreciate, or that I just would be plainly and simply bored with it (not bored of it, Richelle Mead!) and just wouldn't like it. There is a certain brand of feminine humor which I find genderist and obnoxious, but this novel doesn’t have that, and once I got the rhythm of it, it turned out to be funny and engaging.
I'm not sure about the immediate introduction of an instadore candidate, but to be fair, I am not sure either where that will go, so I won't complain about him yet; after all, this is Love Rehab, so there simply has to be a love interest somewhere along the way, I suppose!
So here's the story: Sophie, the female protagonist is going through a huge obsession-depression over the fact that Eric, her long-time boyfriend, dumped her for a younger, curvier "administrative assistant" (yeah, I'll bet!) at his office. Sophie's friend Annie, who is an alcoholic owner of a bar, shows up in her drive in a stolen police car, and is ordered to go through AA in order to avoid a worse sentence. Sophie goes with her and in a chat with the AA leader afterwards, realizes that she has an addiction to love and needs rehab. Since there's no such thing available to her, she undertakes to start one in her New Jersey (or is that Noo Joyzi?) home. She puts out word through her editor (she illustrates children's books), and a host of people show up to the Sunday meeting. They tell their stories, Annie and Sophie end up with a new house-mate named Prithi (no one can live there unless their name ends with an 'ee' sound!), and Love Rehab is launched!
One problem I did have with this was that while undergoing the oppressive struggle to get out from under the aftermath of a bad relationship, Sophie (the name means wisdom!) is talking about getting her eyebrows waxed. Excuse me, but isn't that part of the problem, that women have been conditioned to feel that their natural self is inadequate and in order to be acceptable to men they must turn themselves into the closest approximation to a Barbie doll that they can reasonably (even unreasonably) manage? When I read this I thought: I shall be seriously interested in where that goes as I continue with this!
So these meetings start snowballing with more people showing up, all of them as wacky as we've already met, with bizarre, sad, and humorous stories and as the word gets around it gets distorted. One woman called Katrina shows up asking if this is the right address for the 'Love Retreat'! She ends up moving in, sharing a room with Sophie! She's spoiled rotten rich and still having bad relationships, and she starts offering everyone aroma therapy (gag) and gods know what. I'm over 50% in and loving this tale so far. Not a lot seems ot be happenign in moving Sophie's sotry forwards, btu you get to wrapped up in the peripherals that it doesn't matter. But I guess that depends on how you define 'moving her story forwards'. She's so involved in the group that overall, she's doing fine and is really starting to overcome her addiction without really noticing. Maybe that's the point.
In many ways, this novel could have been written by Nora Ephron (were she still alive. I wouldn’t expect her to write it now!). One of the things I resent about this genre of story is that it's always about fabulously well-off yuppies who never seem to ever have to do an honest week's work, and who get morosely hung up about laughable trivialities. They have pretty much everything they want and they still can't find happiness! This novel was not quite that, but it had enough of that stigma inherent to turn me off it a bit - but not a lot. These characters were fun and interesting, and engaging, but I kept wondering why they never seemed to have to go to work, especially Sophie who can apparently take a straight three months off her job without her editor ever once getting on her case, and without her ever wanting for ready cash to splash around! And she thinks she has problems? It would be really nice to just once have a story like this, but about regular, working stiffs from a life which is a notch or two lower than the Ephron class battleship of thirty-something yuppie-dom.
So the predictable relationship with Joe the Alcoholics Anonymous counselor predictably happens. Although it happens in a better way than all-too-many of the young-adult novels I've been habituating of late, it still smacked of too much YA instadore. I found that to be really sad, because it betrays everything this novel purports to be about, and it is such an unrealistic event as to be a complete sham.
Yes, sometimes you do find the perfect partner on the rebound, but that's not the norm, it’s the extreme rarity. Most of the time when you've been hurt as badly as Sophie was, it wrecks your life and all hopes of a decent relationship in the foreseeable future, because your misery turns others off. There is (almost) never that perfect partner waiting for you just around the corner. In my experience no one even really cares that much because they've all been there too, and rather than being moved by and empathic towards your debilitating withdrawal, they're nauseated by it and don't want to know about it. Certainly, potential partners don't. In my experience, the only real honest and effective way to get through it is to go cold turkey and avoid other people until you get a grip. Of course if you have close friends and they're ready, willing, and able to put up with the ungodly mess that you are, then that's a good way to go, too!
The worst part of this novel was Sophie's love interest, which was telegraphed by someone with a sore thumb sticking out, and it was completely out of place for me. The ending, therefore, was so trite and demeaning as to be truly nauseating; it was an all-Nora-Ephron ending, which betrayed the growth which we're supposed to believe Sophie had undergone by rendering her into a helpless child who needed rescuing by a man, but that's all I have to say about that.
Even having said that, I can still recommend this novel because overall, it's a fun story about an important topic with which we all have some familiarity, some of us more than others. It does slip in the latter half as compared with the first half, and there is a bit of the way-too-predictable going on, but there is also a nice thread of sly humor and a host of interesting people and amazing behaviors to enjoy. So yeah, give it a read! It’s short and fun so what have you got to lose?
