What readers think of Fleishman Is in Trouble, plus links to write your own review.

Reminiscent of Lauren Groff's brilliant novel "Fates and Furies," this remake is whiny, whiny, whiny, as well as a quite daringly sexy read, but most important it is not as erudite, intelligent, or shocking as Groff's literary masterpiece. In all fairness, author Taffy Brodesser-Akner probably doesn't think of this book as a "Fates and Furies" remake, but because the plot/structure similarities are unmistakably alike it's hard not to compare them.

And "Fleishman Is in Trouble" is a poor runner-up.

This is the plot set-up: Toby Fleishman, M.D. is a top hepatologist at a top New York City hospital, making a respectable quarter of million dollars a year. But that's not enough for his wife, Rachel, who has her own creative agency representing actors and makes five times what her husband pulls in. This is Manhattan in the 2000s and it's all about money because it takes a lot of it to buy the lifestyle of a tony apartment with the right address, private schools for the children, a house in the Hamptons, and vacations in Europe. She is greatly annoyed that Toby just doesn't care about any of that. Rachel is all about the money and prestige and impressing others. Toby is all about loving the children. Rachel and Toby's love story dissolves. They separate. They work out child custody. But before the divorce is final, Rachel disappears and goes completely incommunicado, leaving Toby (who has recently discovered sexy dating apps and has become weirdly obsessed with them) with the children.

The novel has three chapters, all told by the narrator—unnamed for quite some time, which is incredibly confusing, if not actually disconcerting—who is an old friend of Toby's named Libby whom he met in Israel during their junior year abroad and hasn't seen since. Libby is a former magazine writer turned happily married, stay-at-home New Jersey suburban mom. The first chapter is from Toby's point of view. The second chapter is mostly from Toby's point of view with a lot of Libby interjecting her own story, while the third chapter is from all three points of view. After all, every marriage—and its disintegration—has two sides.

I am willing to stretch my imagination for every novel I read and give the author a lot of artistic license. But Libby as the narrator is just too much—even for me. Libby is a distant friend, but somehow Libby knows intimate, incredibly personal details about both Toby and Rachel. It is completely, eye-rollingly implausible.

And did I mention it is whiny? Oh, so very, very whiny. Uber-privileged, rich white people who have everything in the world kind of whiny.

One more thing: The ending is awful. Very, very disappointing.

Longlisted for the National Book Award, this is a well-written, satirical novel that is amusing and entertaining, although quite pretentious, but it absolutely does not rise to the level of great literature as its National Book Award nomination would suggest. It is ChickLit. And because of all the whining, it's not even very good ChickLit. Just know you're getting ChickLit and not literature before you buy the book. I have no idea why it's so highly overrated.