How to Fall Out of Love Madly
Ratings5
Average rating4.2
15
Ratings5
Average rating4.2
“Three relatable thirty somethings drive this ode to womanhood. Learning the hard way to love themselves, the women teach invaluable lessons.”—People “Everyone who loves Sally Rooney should be reading Jana Casale!”—Julie Buntin, author of Marlena Three women confront the compromises they’ve made to appease the men they love. Joy and Annie are friends and roommates whose thirty-something lives aren’t exactly what they’d imagined. To make ends meet, they decide to rent their extra bedroom to Theo, who charms Joy with his salt-and-pepper hair and adoration of their one-eyed cat. When Annie goes to live with her boyfriend, Theo and Joy settle into a comfortable domesticity. Then Theo brings home Celine, the girlfriend he’s never mentioned, who is possibly the most stunning woman Joy has ever seen. Joy resolves to do whatever it takes to hold on to him, falling ever deeper into an emotional hellscape of her own making. She is too obsessed to realize that Celine’s beauty doesn’t protect her from pain. Haunted by an event from her past, Celine can’t escape her shame and finds herself in an endless cycle of self-sabotage. Annie is baffled by Joy’s senseless devotion to Theo, but she’s consumed by her own obsessions: she can’t stop parsing her commitment-phobic boyfriend’s texts in an exhausting mission to maintain his approval. At work, where she fully embraces her natural assertiveness, Annie is a star. But when an anonymous letter lands on her desk accusing her esteemed and supportive boss of sexual misconduct, she is forced to decide who and what she’s willing to stand up for. Perceptive, mordantly funny, and full of heart, How to Fall Out of Love Madly examines women’s many relationships—with one another, their mothers, their work, men, and themselves—to reveal their underlying power and complexity. It asks, why do so many smart, compassionate, otherwise empowered women tolerate egregious behavior from the men they love? And what will it take for them to reclaim control?
Reviews with the most likes.
I feel like this book would have really resonated with me had I read it a decade ago! Like the protagonists, I'm in my early 30s - and while you'd imagine that would make them relatable to me, I agree wholeheartedly with another NetGalley reviewer who said they felt younger. Reading about them brought me back to my early 20s, but not in a particularly entertaining or illuminating way. Their dynamics, both inter- and intra-personal, felt overly familiar in the sense that reading an old journal might. It wasn't that I didn't enjoy the experience, but it wasn't new or especially interesting.
For a novel about women, it revolved around men; I'm not confident it would pass the Bechdel test, though I get that it was in large part the point. I do think that Casale did a really nice job building up the character of Theo - his relationship with Joy felt realistic and nuanced, and I understood why she gravitated towards him. I also liked how Joy and Annie's friendship ebbed and flowed throughout the book - their dynamic was a little bit messy, and that felt authentic. Celine, to me, felt like an afterthought - while I probably liked the writing in her sections the most, she didn't feel quite as believable or fleshed-out to me as Joy and Annie did.
Overall, 3.5 stars for me, rounded up to 4. Thanks to NetGalley and Random House Publishing Group—The Dial Press for my ARC.
