Hope in a Jar by Beth Harbison
My rating: [usr 4]
This is a sweet, fluffy, caramel-sticky Chicklit book. If you like that sort of thing, this will be right up your alley. Sometimes, that’s just what I want – sweetness and light and redemption through makeup and a new hair style. It makes life seem easy. It makes you appreciate your girly-girl friendships and the girls you tried on makeup with when you were 12.
“Well, that’s what everyone wants, isn’t it? Even these people who go out and have their noses shaved down to pencil erasers, and who get implants, and fillers, and who Botox their faces into immobility, they’re all in search of the miracle that’s going to make them feel like…” She searched for the word. “Like themselves.”
I rate books on what they are, not against books that are decidedly different from them, which is why this scores such a high rating. It’s fluff, but it’s well-designed fluff. It’s fun fluff. It’s oreo cookies, hot chocolate, pop music and your best friends curled up on a fuzzy blanket with you at a ski lodge fluff.
This book moves back and forth between the 80’s and present day, exploring the friendship between Allie – the pretty one in school, now the broken hearted, lonely, has-put-on-weight-lately and is kind of miserable one – and Olivia – in school the mousy, smart one, now the fashionable independent one. Their friendship fell apart years ago, though a high school reunion has brought them back together, possibly just in time for them to save one another from themselves.
There’s not a lot more to say about this book. It’s a cheerful kind of book. I read a big chunk of it in a bubblebath and read the rest curled up with tea on the sofa. It’s a quick read, a fun read, and a very easy read. Kind of a brain vacation.
