Ruth Pennebaker

Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakthrough is a story about three generation of women living under the same roof trying to cope with each other and with life. Joanie, Ivy and Caroline are each going through changes in their life that they are finding difficult to handle. Joanie is a soon to be 50 divorcee. Her husband is living with a woman half his age and just announced that they are having a baby. Ivy is a widow whose savings has quickly dwindled thanks to the bad economy. She can no longer afford to live on her own and moves in with her daughter Joanie. Caroline is a typical teenager, dealing with her parents divorce, living with her grandmother and being a pea in the very big pond known as High School. What all 3 of these women have in common is that they are trying to find their place in the world and with each other.

I enjoyed reading Women on the Verge. The tone is light, funny and sometimes snarky. The story is told from 3 POVs - Joanie, Ivy and Caroline - so that you get a bird's eye view of what each character is thinking. The character I could relate to the most is Caroline. She doesn't connect with her mother and grandmother. She only has one friend. And she tries to avoid her father completely. I could understand why Joanie's relationship with Ivy was tenuous. Ivy undermines Joanie constantly. She insults her in an infuriating passive-aggressive manner. There was a scene where Joanie finally gave into her anger with her mother and I was happy that she did. Although, I felt sympathy for Joanie, I felt that she was so consumed by her own misery that she couldn't or wouldn't see her daughter's misery. And in typical teenage fashion, Caroline started acting out.

I felt that the "breakthrough" for these women was a little anti-climatic. Towards the end, they do come together and start to see each other in a different light. I felt that the ending was just the beginning for Joanie, Ivy and Caroline. I would have loved to have read more about these women working through their issues with themselves and each other.

Note: I love the cover. Very original and cute… (altro)

I will admit straight off that this title kind of had me at hello. Don’t you love it? Add to that this adorable cover, which makes a whole lot of sense once you’ve read the book, and it’s all kinds of fun.

Aside from that, this was a very entertaining look at the generally ordinary lives of these women living in Texas. It’s the kind of scenario I’d never really thought about – being a middle aged woman with both your mother and teenage daughter living with you. I don’t have any children of my own at the moment, but it’s actually possible that I might have a teenager around the same time that Joanie does. And while the thought of being a single mother fills me with dread, doing that and having my mother in the house? Way worse!

To read the rest of my review, please visit my blog.… (altro)

Angry divorcée, teenager with self-esteem issues, depressed grandmother with emotional problems - put them together in the same house and the story should be full of strange ways of coping with each other and their individual lives. Caroline, a 15 year-old, checks every morning to see if her breasts have grown and worries about never losing her virginity. Her mother, Joanie, is trying to recover from her husband walking out on her and compelling her to enter the workforce when she hasn't held a regular job since college. Finally, you have Ivy, the grandmother, who takes up shoplifting to lift her spirits.

Take this combination and add a runaway father with a pregnant girlfriend who thinks that Caroline should be her new best friend and you should have an entertaining book. Unfortunately, it falls a bit short of expectations.… (altro)

“Hell was three generations of women living under the same roof.”

Joanie “Roxanne” Pilcher is a divorcee who has found out that her ex is going to be a daddy with the young woman he is living with and her new boss, Zoe, thinks she is a charity case. From Joanie: “What was worst of all to Joanie was that Zoe hadn’t seen anything special in her. She had instead glommed on to Joanie as some kind of sad cliché. A shopworn, middle-aged housewife whose husband had dumped her. A feminist cause to be championed. A little social experiment in doing good.”

Ivy Horton is a widow and a kleptomaniac who is forced to live with her daughter and granddaughter when she lost money during the recession. From Ivy: “Depression. Maybe it wasn’t a mental illness anymore. It was what they now called old age.”

Caroline Pilcher is a teen who is misunderstood and angry at her parents for the mess they made of her life. She also has a crush on a boy at school that doesn’t even know she exists…or does he? From Caroline: “Yes, that was it. B.J. saw right through [Caroline], knew she didn’t have any friends, had never been kissed, was a hopeless, flat-chested virgin who spent her whole life thinking, obsessing, dreaming about a good-looking guy who’d barely even noticed her, couldn’t have picked her out in a lineup of felons.”

All three women are lonely and trying to figure out how to cope with their lives and, unfortunately, don’t know how to communicate with each other.

This book is funny and sad and it was a quick read. However, I was disappointed in the ending. Maybe it was me, but I felt that it just stopped. I wanted to know how they all turned out after they discovered themselves and confronted those people that didn’t understand them.

Thank you to Ruth Pennebaker and PR by the Book for giving me the opportunity to review this book.… (altro)