Why You'll Love This
Two women who genuinely despise each other are forced to share a best friend — and neither is entirely wrong about the other.
- Great if you want: dual-perspective comedy with real friction between opposite personalities
- The experience: light and fast-moving with moments of sharper emotional honesty
- The writing: Lancaster leans hard into each woman's voice — distinct, satirical, occasionally self-skewering
- Skip if: midlife suburban comedy isn't your genre — the setup is firmly that
About This Book
Two women who genuinely cannot stand each other are forced to coexist—and eventually cooperate—when their shared best friend's wedding brings them into unavoidable proximity. Jack is a globe-trotting war correspondent with a taste for danger and a deeply held conviction that suburban domesticity represents a kind of slow death. Kitty is the reigning queen of school fundraisers and homemade lunches, equally convinced that Jack's lifestyle is performative chaos dressed up as purpose. Neither is entirely wrong about the other, which is exactly what makes their collision so entertaining and, underneath the barbs, surprisingly moving.
Jen Lancaster builds this novel around alternating first-person perspectives, and she's sharp enough to make both women genuinely funny and genuinely flawed without tipping the scales unfairly. The prose is breezy but not shallow—Lancaster has a gift for a well-timed comic beat, and she uses the contrast between Jack's and Kitty's voices to quietly interrogate the choices women make and the judgments they receive for making them. Readers who enjoy character-driven comedies with something honest lurking beneath the humor will find this one delivers on both counts.