As a struggling screenwriter still grappling with her twin sister’s death, Advika has taken to working Hollywood parties, like the Oscars Afterparty, to pay the rent. That’s where she meets Julian Zelding, famed producer. He sweeps her off her feet (despite being 41 years her senior and doing weird and unrealistic things like celebrate 4.5 month anniversaries) and they are [very] soon married. Shortly after their whirlwind wedding, Julian’s first wife dies and offers to leave Advika $1M and a confidential film reel as long as she divorces him first. What has her husband been hiding? Advika embarks on a quest to learn more about her husband and his three previous wives while hopefully finding herself in the process.
I hate to say it, but I was just really not a fan of this book. I get what the author was trying to do – moving through impossible grief clouds your judgement. But the scenarios in this situation were just not believable. The age gap is just a bit too wide and the red flags were a bit too red for any of Advika’s behavior to make sense. Somehow every decision she makes seems out of character and contradictory, based on what we know about her. The plot seems to push toward a big reveal about Julian and his former wives, but in the end the reveal is that he’s…just a subpar husband? And since he didn’t really have anything on Advika and she claims not to care about the money, there was nothing stopping her from just leaving. So why doesn’t she? I guess there would be no book.
Advika is impossible to support. When she goes on vacation the day after starting brand new job when the company wouldn’t approve it, she seems shocked to have lost the plush gig. Julian wasn’t even leveraging much of his unbalanced power; yet she blames him for everything when the reality is she lost a job because she didn’t do the work. And she acts like Julian telling her not to Google him is this huge deal, but it’s because he says he’ll be open if she asks – she just doesn’t ask him anything. That’s on you, girl. And if she didn’t want to have an uncomfortable conversation, she could very easily get the info on a device that wouldn’t be tapped. Just go to coffee with a friend and ask them to Google something on their phone. This is not groundbreaking stuff here.
Basically, the man wants to be a father and gets pissy when the women he marries don’t want the same. And when the respective pair realizes they want different things, they get divorced. Isn’t that how it’s supposed to work? The thing I found least believable is that Julian keeps trying to force a traditional marriage and children on women who aren’t looking for that. I think the author marries him off to women who are increasingly younger with decreasing independent professional success to show that he wants women he can control so he can achieve his end goal of having a kid and arm candy…but wouldn’t it just be easier (and more likely) to just find someone with no career ambitions? There are plentyyyy of women in Hollywood who would like nothing more than to be a trophy wife and pop out kid after kid with an extremely wealthy, successful, respected, and attractive man. If that’s what he wanted, he could have found one in an instant…but then I guess, again, we wouldn’t have a book.
2 out of 5 stars.
Pair with: A cosmopolitan with pop rocks or a lollipop because Advika just seems like a stupid child
Peaches to Apples 