Unhitched: The Untold Story of the Evil Queen 2

An okay follow-up to the first book. It's extremely repetitive and so easy to figure out what's happening almost immediately. Protagonist Jane spends like 85% of the book crying and literally vomiting, after several people encourage her to actually confront her husband she... doesn't. Until the very end. But nobody including her therapist seems to care that she's literally making no effort?

The not-really subplots with Calla go nowhere - she for some reason is in love with a frog and has a massive melt down when the frog escapes to mate with a frog, and a character suggests her overreaction is actually symptomatic of some bigger issue Calla is having. This is never addressed again. So why was Calla freaking out so much over a frog??? We never find out. I thought it was going to lead to a heart-to-heart between Jane and Calla where Calla reveals she feels abandoned by her father (who's busy with his gallery opening), but nope. Never comes up again.

There's a recurring piece of advice that's basically “just because Person A cheated on Person B doesn't mean Person A doesn't still love Person B, so Person B should forgive Person A” which is really weird that it came up so many times, with no nuance? There's no like “Oh yeah he forgave me for cheating on him, but I had to work for years to re-earn his trust.” It's just “Yeah I was forgiven for cheating and it's fine now, so you should forgive YOUR husband for cheating on you.” It was just weird and made me uncomfortable with how many characters were apparently totally fine with cheating/being cheated on?

Jane resolves to Finally Do Something what feels like 75 times, and it gets so annoying. Also annoying is how much of this book is just a recap of fairy tales. Gothel spends like two pages describing the plot of Rapunzel for some reason.

And...
Like I said, it's incredibly obvious pretty much immediately that Jane is already pregnant, and of course that Gallant is not actually cheating on her. So the extremely sustained misunderstanding throughout the first like 210 pages isn't fun to read. The explanation in-universe for why Jane didn't realize she was pregnant is fine, although it doesn't really make sense to me that as soon as she knows she's pregnant she now constantly feels the baby kicking when she didn't before. Her friends give her terrible advice. And it was weird, Winnie is so casual for so long about not caring at all that Jane thinks her marriage is in danger, then abruptly decides that she and Jane should stop hanging out for a while, and then as abruptly she and Jane are friends again and Winnie cares SO MUCH about Jane's worries about being cheated on. It seriously feels like the author wrote half of this book at once and came back to it after like two years without rereading anything.

I really enjoyed the first book, but the sequel is just... not it. I didn't hate it, but I don't think I'll ever reread it. I'd love to see like a “director's cut” of the sequel, though. The storyline is okay and the characters are good, it's like the book just needs something to be as great as the first one.