Heartwarming story about the middle part of our lives
Once I started reading this book, I could not put it down. It's heartwarming, funny, poignant and honest. The book follows Alice, as she tries to navigate that period of life after newlywed and before retirement. The real strength of the book is the characters. You feel like you know, or are, these people. You are invested in what happens to them. I also enjoyed the format of the book, as it jumped from Alice's responses to the Research Questions, to Facebook to narrative. It was a nice touch. Overall I give this book a big thumbs up.
Rated of 5
by Sheila S. (Supply, NC)
Wife 22
I loved Wife 22. The main character, Alice Buckle, is a gem. Her character is revealed through her Facebook posts, her Twitter comments, her Google searches, and foremost through her email answers to an on-line survey on marriage in the 21st century. What an ingenious use of our reliance on social media. Alice is endearingly funny in her relationships, whether it is agonizing over her 12 year old son's sexuality or her teen aged daughter's possible bulimia. She is also wistful in looking back at the early stages of her relationship with her husband and wondering whether they have lost each other. There are some hilarious scenes, including shopping for feminine hygiene products with her daughter and staging a 3rd grade production of Charlotte's Web. The dialogue throughout is clever and funny. In fact, the whole book is incredibly funny but also very thought-provoking. Melanie Gideon has created a wonderful book. I'm already looking forward to her next one.
Rated of 5
by Dawn C. (Meridian, ID)
Wife 22 by Melanie Gideon
Alice Buckle is upon her tipping year, the year her mother died at the age of 45. As Alice is looking online one day she gets invited into a marital research study online. She decides to do it and is assigned her online pen name Wife 22. Through answering the study questions she is reminded of her early dating/parenting/marital times with her husband William. All is not well in the marriage and the online researcher becomes her new best friend, a kind of therapy. I found this book to be very entertaining, and enjoyed being reminded of some of my own early experiences with my husband. I highly recommend this book to any woman who has been married for any length of time.
Rated of 5
by Marta M. (Santa Ana, CA)
omg/lol
I really enjoyed this book. Yes, it is a bit of fluff, but such an enjoyable bit of fluff. I really enjoyed the way it was written in internet speak. It had facebook statuses, google searches, tweets, and facebook chats. It was romantic and had a lot of laughs. I especially enjoyed the gap between the generations. Alice the heroine was interesting and well written. It will be a very good beach read this summer.
Rated of 5
by Kay B. (Lake Jackson, TX)
Insider's Look at Marriage
I thoroughly enjoyed this story of a marriage, friendship, and parenthood told through the tools of modern technology. As the “wife” answers questions from an online marriage survey, readers who have been married at least 15 years will be able to relate to her revealing answers whether the answer is a short, direct answer or a lengthy, sometimes rambling answer. Her relationships with her father, children, and friends often explored via “twitter” or “e-mail” will be familiar to readers at the same stage of life. This was an engaging, easy to read book that I didn’t want to see end.
Rated of 5
by Wendy F. (Kalamazoo, MI)
Wife 22
I needed a novel for a bit of an escape from the stress in my life when Wife 22 arrived. It was just what I needed. Melanie Gideon brings us into Alice Buckle's household where we get to see the lives of a long married couple and their two teenage kids. Alice is a bit bored with her life and decides to engage in a marriage survey that she receives via email. That's when we learn even more about this family and what goes on in a 40-something woman's mind when let to wander. I really enjoyed the story although it might have been a little predictable in parts. Fun and thoughtful read!
Rated of 5
by Joan P. (Owego, NY)
Wife 22
Wife 22 was not my cup of tea. Perhaps my age and intolerance for living life electronically is the reason. It reinforces my belief that we live in a superficial world of quick posts and instant information and miss the warmth of face to face involvement. William and Alice are husband and wife that share a house and two children but their marriage has become routine. The children, Zoe and Peter are typical children with normal growing up problems that Alice completely misdiagnoses. She is sure her sensitive , loving son is gay and her daughter has an eating disorder. The minor characters are interesting and much more attractive than Alice and William. I would like to know more about Nedra, Bunny and Charlotte. They all have more wisdom and kinder dispositions. The writing style is jarring, switching from Facebook posts to Google searches to straight narrative. I think the format will be very appealing to the computer generation, not me.
Stranger than fiction, blending tragedy and farce, How to Create the Perfect Wife is an engrossing tale of the radicalism, and deep contradictions, at the heart of the Enlightenment.
Although heavy on the scientific details, which slowed down the story for me (OK, I admit, I was one of those liberal arts majors who skipped out on...
read more
Loved this book. Magical, quirky, enchanting I could go on. All books do not have to be literary fiction, sometimes it is just so comforting to read...
read more
Can an wiser, older narrator view the past with more wisdom than he might have possessed forty years earlier in the summer he was thirteen? Ordinary...
read more
U.S. ebook sales up in 2012, but rate of growth is slowing(May 16 2013) In 2012, trade book sales (i.e. non academic book sales) rose 6.9%, to $15.049 billion, and e-book sales continued to grow, although the rate of growth...
Full Story
of 5
by Gayle M. (Billerica, MA)
of 5
by Marta M. (Santa Ana, CA)
of 5
by Joan P. (Owego, NY)
