I usually spend my time with dead Russians or brooding Victorians, but sometimes—usually after a particularly brutal week of grading essays on The Great Gatsby—I need to see what the rest of the world is actually reading. Denise (my wife) left this one queued up on the shared account, so I gave it a shot while walking the dog along the lakefront.
And honestly? It's basically Madame Bovary in yoga pants.
The Voice in My Head
We need to talk about the narrator, Tracee Chimo, because she is... a choice. A bold one. If you look at the reviews, half the people want to give her an award and the other half want to throw their phone into Lake Michigan. I get it. Her voice for Allison, the protagonist, is frantic, nasal, and occasionally grates on the nerves like a student tapping a pen during a silent reading period.
Here's the thing—I think the "annoying" quality is actually brilliant. (My students would roll their eyes if they heard me say that.) Allison is a woman spiraling into prescription pill addiction while trying to maintain a Pinterest-perfect life. She should sound frantic. She should sound like she's trying too hard. Chimo captures that specific frequency of suburban desperation that makes you want to look away, but you can't.
However—and this is a big however—the child voice. Yikes.
Chimo does that thing narrators do where they pitch their voice up three octaves to sound like a five-year-old, and it just sounds like a cartoon character on helium. I literally winced. I was listening while correcting papers in the faculty lounge and Principal Martinez walked in right as the "kid" was whining about a lost toy. I had to pretend I was listening to a very avant-garde podcast. If you're sensitive to pitchy voices, this might break you.
The Slow Slide
Jennifer Weiner gets written off as "chick lit" (a term I despise, by the way), but the writing here is sharper than people give it credit for. It's scary. Not Stephen King scary, but real-life scary. The way Allison justifies just one more Vicodin because her back hurts, or because her husband is ignoring her, or just to get through a "Jump & Pump" class... it's insidious.
It reminds me of Hemingway's line about how you go bankrupt: "Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly." That's exactly how this book feels. You're laughing at the satire of the mommy-blogger culture one minute, and then suddenly you realize you're watching a woman drown in her own bathtub. It's uncomfortable. It's supposed to be.
That same uncomfortable satire of privilege and self-destruction runs through Pineapple Street, though with less addiction and more old money drama.
Who This Is (and Isn't) For
If you want sharp suburban satire with real teeth—and you can handle a narrator who sounds as frantic as her character feels—this one's worth your time. Skip it if you're already stressed about your own life, or if pitchy child voices make you want to hurl your earbuds into the nearest body of water.
Class Dismissed
This isn't a cozy listen. It's stressful. I found myself walking faster on the lakefront just to work off the anxiety Allison's bad decisions were giving me.
If you can get past the polarizing narration style (and seriously, maybe sample it first), it's a gut-punch of a story about how thin the line is between "having it all" and losing everything.
