This book started out promising but quickly disintegrated after chapter 1.

The narrator was too snarky for me. And the humor was too dark.

I couldn't get past the middle. Put it this way---I read before going to bed and my goal is to finish one chapter before I turn off the light--I fell asleep before finishing a chapter. I seldom do that.

I can't wait for my Sarah Strohmeyer books arrive! I ordered them from my local bookstore! ( )

I read this in between Halloween reads last week and just forgot to update and publish a review. " I used to really love Anna Maxted. She was one of my go to chick lit authors. Then she disappeared and I fell into like/love with other authors. I think that "Running in Heels" was interesting though on a re-read I realized how problematic it was. The same thing happened with "Getting Over It." It used to be a favorite, but I realized that the main character (Helen) is a jerk to her friends and to people she dates. Without realizing it, she's the female version of her jerk of a father. There is no scales falling from her eyes side of the road moment though. Instead there are just a bunch of things that happen and then the book limps off to a happish ending.

Helen Bradshaw is in a dead endish kind of job (she's an assistant to a tyrant) and has two really good friends (Lizzy and Tina) and an okayish relationship with her parents. When her mother calls and tells her that her father is in the hospital after suffering a heart attack, both women are left stunned when he passes away. For Helen, her father was always there. She tries her best to be there for her mother, grandmother, all while dating and dealing with her cat Fatboy. She makes a connection with a vet named Tom the day of her father's funeral, and then due to circumstances keeps coming back to him while she tries to grow up.

Helen is in her late twenties and self absorbed. I realized on re-read she's also selfish as hell too. She breaks up with a boyfriend who is a prat (Jasper) and then admits she still wants him hanging around cause of her not being able to stand on her own two feet. And then she gets involved with her roommate Marcus and blows off Tom cause Marcus commands her to. When that blows up she drifts back over to Tom and honestly I was sick of reading her bouncing from guy to guy since she wanted them to fix everything wrong in her life. I just realized she's no better than her mother who needed her father to tell her what to do as well.

When Helen finds out something about her close friend, she gets mad when another friend doesn't believe it (Helen tells it to her in a gossipy I head way) and then she doesn't do much but call that friend and try to force her to break up with him. It just felt like a weird side plot to put in this book. It didn't help that then the friend seemed to maybe getting pushed into another relationship after the disastrous one and I really didn't understand what the heck was going on.

Helen's friends have some backstory to them, but we don't get to spend much time with them. Unless Helen is mocking them to the readers or to their face, she doesn't seem to give a good crap about them. Same issue with the men in her life. I just realize that I started to find her unpleasant and I was only halfway through the book.

The writing is okay, there is a lot of banter, but none of it really made me think much besides the fact most of the people except for Tom, Izzie, and Tina sucked.

The flow was awful though. I am still confused about the timeline, but it appears to be a year in Helen's life showing the effects of her father's death on her and their family.

The ending eh. It was a happy ending, just not much of one I thought. ( )

I just reread this book, which I remember reading a loving years ago. It's still so funny and touching, but some of the plot seems a bit awkward. If anybody could just sit down and talk to another character for two minutes, everything could have been sorted out SO EASILY! But I guess without that tension, there wouldn't have been a book to read. ( )

Twenty-something Helen's life is turned upside down when her father dies suddenly and unexpectedly. As Helen, her mother, and her grandmother each try to deal with their grief in their own way, Helen also battles with her thankless job, her string of bad relationships, her boorish roommates, her troublesome cat, and various tiffs with her best gal pals. With all this going on, how will Helen ever survive a year of grief and guilt?

I'm not sure what to make of this book. In the beginning, Helen was so incredibly shallow and vapid that I was ready to give up on the book. My need to see books through to the end was stronger than my dislike of Helen, and I found she could redeem herself ... although she often went back to being just as dumb again, at least her motives started being in the right place. And while part of me is ready to write this book of as fluff, there are rather deep subjects covered; in addition to the through-line about grief, there is a side story about domestic violence. While the prose style manages to stay pretty airy throughout, these topics are looked at seriously enough.

My big complaint with the book might be more that it seems to ramble and jump about a great deal. Yet somehow, even after 400 pages worth of Helen's various issues, the ending seems a bit abrupt. Overall, it's a pretty entertaining read for when you're looking for something fairly light and quick, but it's not a great work of literature. ( )

Well, I don't fall into either the loveit or hateit camp here, but the book was really pretty good and, much more than just a chick-lit. The heroine's father dies in the opening pages of the book, and the story really revolves about the trauma she and her mother have coming to grip with his sudden death. Then it does have the chick-lit relationships frenzy, but some more dark than frivolous. I'm glad I read it. ( )