This was a fast paced and easy to read book about a 40 something woman deciding to take on some of the demons that have haunted her since high school.

The overall plot is a little bit wacky (as all of Matthew Dicks plots are) but it all felt very true to me and as a person who is very much like Caroline, it brought back some familiar feelings from high school.

I also love this one sentence more than anyone should: "...when you're forty, you're not supposed to be this stupid." ( )

I neither liked or disliked this. It was perfectly... okay. The characters were... okay. All-in-all, it was kind of a disappointing follow-up to Memoirs of an Imaginary Friend. ( )

Advance reader copy. This is a light and easy read. While I enjoyed the ease of reading, I found the high school incident requiring a "comeback" to be fairly insignificant in the grand scheme of things. Something a bit more traumatic might have triggered such a response but I had trouble buying that this mom went to such great lengths to find revenge against her former best friend. And honestly, she didn't even want the revenge as it turned out. Her daughter should get full credit for the perfect comeback, not Caroline herself. I thought the dialogue between mother and daughter was well-written, especially coming from a male author. Overall, an easy read that could spark some deeper conversation but not well enough developed in plot or character. ( )

I loved this book! Laugh out loud hilarity and tons of tender ache moments that are part and parcel of being a female of any age with goals formed by living through the experiences of being an impressionable teenager, a victim of your best girlfriend(s), an unfulfilled wife and a mother who never quite feels she has measured up to the task. This book resonated with me on so many levels; I saw pieces of myself commingled with snapshots of my family and friends in Caroline Jacobs. She left me feeling uplifted and invigorated about launching my own comeback. Shocker that her story was so beautifully written by a man!!

I received an ARC of this novel from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for posting an honest review online. ( )

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)

Although most of the reading I do for this website tends to be either hip little indie novels or bizarrely strange science-fiction, I do like to also regularly pick up a title now and then that might best be called a "cozy novel," by which I mean domestic-based dramas set among gently conservative middle-class suburban families. And the latest such type of novel I've read, Matthew Dicks' The Perfect Comeback of Caroline Jacobs, is not a bad one for this type at all, although the first big thing you should be warned about is that this hits every single one of the cozy trademarks that are bound to drive people crazy when they're not already fans of such aspects; in particular, this book is especially guilty of one of the cozy traits that drives me craziest, of having teenagers first act like petulant, cellphone-staring little monsters, just to immediately have them transition to acting like middle-aged parents themselves as a way of resolving a plot point, without the teens ever being allowed a single moment in the book to act like actual teens. (And in general you could say that this is a general problem with cozy novels that stretches across several specific aspects of these books -- that they tend to be written in a way that a genteel suburban parent wishes the world worked, instead of the way the world actually works...which of course is the main reason such novels are so popular with genteel suburban parents in the first place.) Still, though, despite the easily guessable plot (SHOCKING SPOILER ALERT: sometimes teenage bullies grow up to regret their actions), and despite the randomly quirky details added for no other reason than to just be randomly quirky (Grandma runs a pet cemetery!), this was actually not too bad a book as far as cozy novels go, with a legitimately dark and moving ending that redeems much of the mediocre plot developments that come before. A mild recommendation in general, but much more strong for those who already prefer these kinds of low-stakes, basic-cable kind of stories.

Out of 10: 8.0, or 9.0 for fans of genteel suburban domestic dramas ( )