Recently Released Reviews: Before I Met You

Before I Met You by Lisa Jewell

Publisher: Random House

Released: 10.15.13

Lisa Jewell has created an interesting story of 20-something Betty, leaving her home island of Gurnsey for the city of London to see what life has in store for her while trying to find the mysterious Clara Pickle, the woman her step-grandmother has left all her money to.  The story takes Betty into 1920s London and a world of Jazz clubs and intrigue she didn’t think her grandmother was capable of.   Unfortunately the novelty of the plot is all this novel has going for it.  With flat, unrealistic characters, improbable romances with little chemistry, and little that leaves you invested in the outcome.  I had high hopes for this book, but it did not deliver.

Obviously, as a Jewell book, this novel falls in the chick-lit, light side of literature.  I didn’t come to this book expecting it to be a great work

of literature like The Luminaries  (also released in the US on 10.13) but I did expect a little more from it.  Chick-lit lives and dies on the lovability of its characters and the reality of the romances.  Betty starts of realistic and her relationship with grandmother Arlette makes the first third of this novel live up to what I thought the whole novel would be.

But.  When Betty movies to London things just get weird.  There’s the somewhat irrelevant side story and rockstar Dom Jones.  The tepid kind of sort of romance with John Brightly, and the odd assortment of neighbors that seem to be thrown in as a caricature of what people expect to read about city life that lack the description to make them believable.

Then there’s the flashback to Arlette’s story, which held up a little longer than Betty’s but eventually fell in the trap of “hurry up and make a plot” and the characters started to fall apart, with an almost unbelievable rape side story that really caused the whole thing to take a strange (and confusing) turn.

The writing is done well and there are some chapters that make things interesting, but overall I finished the story more grateful it was over than excited about the outcome.

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher.