Book Review: Vinegar Girl (Hogarth Shakespeare) by Anne Tyler

Title: Vinegar Girl, Anne Tyler
Print Length: 240 pages
Publisher: Hogarth
Publication Date: June 21, 2016

Modern updates to age old tales have been a theme lately. Similar to the Jane Austen project (ie: Eligible), Anne Tyler’s Vinegar Girl is a part of the Hogarth Shakespeare series retelling of Shakespeare’s classic The Taming of the Shrew. I love an update to a classic just as much as the next person and had fairly high expectations for Anne Tyler on this one. She didn’t disappoint.

Kate Battista is obstinate, socially awkward and entirely devoid of tact. But she’s also lonely. Living at home as a caretaker for her eccentric scientist father and dimwitted (yet popular) high school aged sister, Kate finds herself drifting through her day to day activities relegated to the fact that her life consists of preparing the same weekly meals, keeping Bunny away from boys and doing her father’s taxes. Caretaking seems to be her thing, as even this extends to her profession as an assistant at a preschool (I got a laugh out of her interactions with her young charges). Kate, it seems, takes care of everything. So when her father’s lab assistant’s visa is on the brink of expiration, naturally it is Kate whom he looks to as the solution to his problem. Because why wouldn’t his eldest daughter with very few prospects want to marry his brilliant, foreign lab assistant?

Eight Must Have Books for the Fashionable Reader

As children we often exhibit behavioral tendencies that we sometimes carry with us throughout our lives. Take a second and think back to when you were a child. Got it? Great. Now was there anything that you used to do that you maybe still do today as an adult? Here's what I have:

I used to go through three or four different outfits in a day - not because my clothes got messy or dirty - I simply enjoyed changing my outfit multiple times a day.

Sorry mom for all the extra laundry you had to do when I was a kid.

This is something that I still do today. On an average day I'll probably change my outfit three to four times a day. (BTW I now do my own laundry)

#bookconfessions: I Hate Recommending Books and Here's Why...

Book Confession: I hate recommending books to people.

I realize that for someone who reads as often as I do that this is a very strange aversion. Usually people who read and write love to share their favorites with others, it encourages a sense of community and people tend to like that. But I dislike being put on the spot – and as a book blogger I’m inevitably asked for a recommendation which consequently leads to me breaking out in hypothetical hives and a cold sweat and here’s why:

Book Review: Eligible by Curtis Sittenfield

Title: Eligible, Curtis Sittenfield

Length: 512 pages

Publisher: Random House

Publication Date: April 19^, 2016

Rating: 4/5 stars

Countless retellings of Jane Austen’s classic, Pride and Prejudice have been published, made into movies or miniseries specials, but none are so fun and smart as Curtis Sittenfield’s, Eligible, which offers a modern day take on Austen’s original rom-com. Liz Bennet is a brash, quick witted woman living in New York working as a writer for popular women’s magazine, along with her sister Jane, who is a yoga instructor, both rapidly approaching forty and still single (much to their mother’s chagrin).  

When their father’s ailing health brings both eldest Bennet sisters back to their childhood home of Cincinnati, they arrive to find their home in disrepair, the family’s finances askew and the younger Bennet sisters unemployed and ignorant to their family issues. Kitty and Lydia are too preoccupied with their social lives consisting of cross fit, manicures and paleo dieting to help their parents and Mary is a professional student, completing multiple degrees, and her only social activity consisting of mysterious Tuesday night outings, where she goes she won’t say.

Chip Bingley is fresh off a season of a popular TV Reality dating series, Eligible, where he infamously refused to propose to either woman at the end of the show, and has relocated from Los Angeles to the mid-west for a position as an ER Doctor in a Cincinnati Hospital. Accompanied by his friend, Fitzwilliam Darcy, a proud and aloof neurosurgeon, he encounters the Bennett family at a Fourth of July barbeque hosted by their co-worker, Dr. Lucas – I’m sure you’re seeing where this goes…