ARC Review: Mad About You by Mhairi McFarlane

Mad About You by Mhairi McFarlane
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

2.5 stars rounded up

First off, it should be noted the romance in this book was limited to approximately 2 chapters out of the 57 total in the book. Do not go into this book expecting a very romantic book as you will be disappointed. What the book does offer is a reflection on relationships one has throughout their life and how they can affect you. Family, friend, romantic, roommate/tenant, even employee/employer is explored in some way.

The strongest part of the book, for me, was when the women who had the same emotionally abusive ex as Harriet (the main character) found each other and took down the ex publicly. I would have massively preferred the story end here but it DIDN'T. I was perfectly OK accepting the written out "hahaha"s and the ghosts of boyfriends past stuff until the very end when a romance was shoved in at the last minute. I would have even been OK with the romance except for one simple thing: at the beginning, Harriet states very clearly she is not interested in marriage. At the end, it is a flash forward of her relationship with the guy she was renting a room from and it is stated in a backwards way they get MARRIED. Why on earth does every author insist on having people who do not want to have kids or get married doing one or both of those things in the epilogue anyway? It is perfectly valid for Harriet to never get married and have a relationship with the dude she ends up with.

I knew this was going to happen as soon as I read the line "Harriet had no moral objection to marriage; she just had no interest either." there was gonna be a reversal of the stance by the end. So uninteresting and predictable. A much more powerful statement would have been ending with Harriet getting closure from her dead mother by finally reading the letter she's carried around for years and standing up to her abusive ex with her newfound female friendships and instead it's all thrown out in favor of oh if Harriet just opened her heart up she will get married! It just takes finding the right guy! Gross.

One final note, the massive amount of chapters is because they are incredibly short and each chapter contains exactly one scene. I'm not a big fan of this as it made the already long book feel even longer.

I received an ARC copy of this book from Netgalley in exchange for my honest review. All opinions are my own.

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