The Accidental Book Club by Jennifer Scott was a monthly read for our book club. Books with "book" or anything "book like" in the title always draw me in. I might have picked it up even if it were not the choice of my book club. It was a quick and easy read and "okay." Knowing what meaning being in a book club has for me, I expected and hoped for more.

Read my complete review at http://www.memoriesfrombooks.com/2021/11/the-accidental-book-club.html ( )

Jean is stronger than she thinks and boy is her strength tested.

Jean lost her husband two years ago, the man was truly the other part of her. She's spent the last two years living alone because her two children are adults.

She started a book club after losing her husband. The book club sounds like great fun, they each make a nice dish to bring and they share dinner and drinks and book talk. They've become Jean's closest friends.

One day Jean gets a call, he son-in-law asks if Bailey can stay with her. This all comes about after some major drama with Jean's daughter and rehab.

So Jean pretty much inherits this teenager who can be absolutely awful at times. It's a real test of her love and patience to try to do right for her grand daughter even while she's constantly being tested by her.

Great characters.
Bailey was a pain in the butt for a long time but you can understand how hurt she's been
Jean's daughter is just unlikeble in my opinion though. But I guess if she'd been more likable than that would have changed the book a lot.

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The Accidental Book Club was a little hard for me to get into at first. I didn’t care for the main characters, Jean and Bailey. They drove me bonkers. But in the end I wound up really feeling for these characters.


Jean doesn’t know how to be a widow. She’s always sad, and can’t seem to move on. She’s extremely lucky she has the wonderful group of women in her book club to keep her occupied. I absolutely love her friend Loretta. She says the most off the wall things, and brings so much humor to the group. I think the fact that Jean is extremely mopey in the beginning is what I didn’t care for at first, or it could be her almost non-existent relationship with her granddaughter. She just doesn’t seem to care about anything except living in the past.


Bailey is a hot mess. She does outrageous things to get attention. She knows that’s why she does it, but she still continues with the shenanigans. I can understand her need for someone to notice her, but there are other ways to make that happen. I think her living with her grandmother was a great thing for her. It opened her eyes to more than just her problems.


Both Jean and Bailey grow so much throughout this novel. They break out of their shells, and learn that it’s okay to be sad and grieve, but not to let the world pass you by. Everyone has problems, but it’s how you handle it that makes the difference.



This book makes a great book club read. I’m even going to suggest it to mine. :D ( )

The home is a place of sanctuary for many children, but what happens when that is not the case? This book is about a girl from a broken home and a grandmother with a crushed soul. Both feel lost and defeated, but do not realize that if they look at what is in front of them, they might see what needs to be seen. Jean Vison is a widower that is unable to move beyond her spouse’s passing. Due to her husband’s traumatic death, Jean has hidden herself away in her home. In order to save herself from inner turmoil, she has slowly decided to re-enter the living domain. One of her small steps back into the real world has been the creation of a book club. It is in these monthly meetings, that Jean has had the opportunity to maintain healthy relationships with various ladies. However, it is not long before she gets a call from her son-in-law that asks her to come assist him with her daughter. From there Jean is thrown in the world of utter chaos, for the daughter she raised is nothing like the one that left home. Jean must somehow help herself, save her daughter, and be a parent figure to her granddaughter Bailey. Can Bailey learn to trust her grandmother? Can Jean save her daughter and her granddaughter before it is too late?

I must first admit that I was not too keen on this book when I received it. I have never been one to read chick lit books, but I have to admit that I was pleasantly wrong. I found myself enjoying this book from the beginning to the end. I loved the brutal honesty that came along with the characters and I liked how the author did not try to sugar coat anything. The author kept things pretty damn real. As a person who has a family member that is female, a mother, and an alcoholic; this book came pretty close to home. She did a very good job portraying some of the things that can happen between mothers and daughters when alcohol is involved. I loved how the relationships were formed and how Jean struggled to manage her personal life and monitor her daughter’s mental health. I valued the characters in the book and enjoyed the diversity. Each one was unique and none were dull. I highly recommend this book to those that are looking for something different to read. It was a nice change from what I have been reading lately. I must thank both the author and goodreads for sending me this book in a giveaway. It was much appreciated and I will be passing it along to a friend! ( )

An interesting work of fiction that touches on the relationships between wives and husbands, parents and adult children, parents and children, grandparents and grandchildren and the importance of support groups of friends who can come together and offer, if nothing else, a listening ear and presence. I liked this book which dealt with the grieving process of one widow and the relationship dynamic between her and her granddaughter, a troubled youth whose parents were so involved with their own issues they had no time for hers. ( )

Having read THE SISTER SEASON, last year and enjoyed it; was excited to read THE ACCIDENTAL BOOK CLUB by Jennifer Scott. The stunning front cover draws you into a group of women and their book club (what is not to like about a book club).

As with most clubs, in addition to discussing books there is also an ample amount of food, wine, and of course, a wide variety of personalities, discussions, new friendships, support, and a means to escape into the lives of characters of books.

An engaging novel of a group of diverse women of different generations, learning to cope and help one another find their way. A story of second chances and how some people can change the course of your life.

Jean, a widow going through a tough time, mourning her husband and now she has a group of six women who meet the second Tues of every month for dinner, wine, and lots of laughs, and books.

Of course it was a book club; and they were there for the books, not the food; however Jean realizes the ladies (herself included) look for more than a rekindling love of reading--they need a welcome distraction from their lonely or boring lives, not to mention the food! With more talk about the brown sugar icing on Mitzi's bananas Foster bars than about plot development or symbolism.

It was never just quiche or capers or balsamic drizzle. It could be one of Dorothy's sons in jail, a divorce, an ex's new girlfriend, Mitzi's political rants, Loretta's off-color jokes, poor Janet's nervous and skittish personality while she desperately tried to join the conversation, or May's dating woes. Jean is just glad once a month for two hours she does not have to think about Wayne and how much she misses him.

Loretta wants to escape into erotica, with a lack of intimacy in her own marriage. Dorothy always worries about her troubled sons, causing her stress. Janet is rather shy and overweight, and being abused by her boss. May is younger and quite the entertainer with her dating stories. Mitzi always has drama and comments on every book. Loretta enjoys trashy romances.

As Jean’s family begins to unravel when Bailey (her troubled teen granddaughter), comes to live with her – she definitely turns to her book club for comfort and support. (Bailey’s mom is an alcoholic and an absentee father). Jean is still grieving for her husband, and then finds she now has to deal with her rebellious granddaughter.

Full of fun characters – each with their own life’s challenges. While each of them experience growth during the book, they have new friends to help support them along the way!

http://judithdcollins.booklikes.com/post/892941/the-accidental-book-club
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I have belonged to more than my fair share of book clubs through the years. Each time we move, it is the first thing I try to find because it helps me to escape the drudgery of unpacking and mitigates my loneliness at least once a month until I settle into a new life. So I can certainly appreciate a book club's power to help heal and the ways that members love and support one another. Certainly that has been the case many times over in my own life. The same is true in Jennifer Scott's The Accidental Book Club, about a group of women who come together to help each other in ways great and small.

Jean Vison lives alone, still mourning the death of her husband, Wayne, several years before. She isn't particularly close to her perfect daughter, Laura, not having seen her daughter and her family since her Wayne's funeral. She has built a life for herself though, startled out of her loneliness by her best friend and neighbor Loretta, who convinced Jean to start a book club to pull her out of her well of grief. And the women in the book club have become supportive friends, each handling and sometimes sharing her own challenges as well. Loretta's turned to steamy romance novels to make up for the fact that her retired husband has retreated to his recliner and no longer offers her physical or emotional intimacy in her marriage. Dorothy is constantly having to bail one son or another out of trouble or jail, railing about her no good ex every step of the way. May is unattached and seems to have the worst dating luck on the planet. Mitzi is obdurate and opinionated, often coming across as abrasive. And shy, retiring Janet, maligned for her size, is so reserved with her constant blushing that she is dismissed and trod upon.

While each of the women have something they are struggling with in their own lives, the focus is on Jean, especially when she receives a phone call from her son-in-law informing her that her daughter Laura is in the hospital. It is a terrible shock to Jean to discover that Curt and Laura are separated but an even bigger shock to be told that Laura is an alcoholic and needs to go to rehab. But that's not the last of the surprises for Jean. When Curt calls several days later and asks her to take Bailey, the teenaged granddaughter she barely knows, to live with her because he can't handle the child, Jean doesn't know what to do besides say yes. And so she's landed with a sullen, attention-starved, bitter teenager exploding into Jean's solitude and comfort, embarrassing her in front of her friends. It gets even more confused and stressful when Laura arrives on Jean's doorstep as well, having checked herself out of rehab. As Jean navigates her suddenly changed family circumstances, trying to break through to Bailey and understand how best to help Laura, the book club that she started as a way to rejoin the world after Wayne's death supports and helps her again. When she decides to take life by the horns, they are behind her all the way.

Both Jean and Bailey have to learn to let go of and forgive the past if they each want to come through their deep unhappiness, Jean for the loss of her husband and Bailey for the raw deal she figures life has handed her. But the novel is not all grief and strife; the scene where the book club has a chance to skewer the author they have read is quite funny and the still evolving relationships between the various women are touching. The different women of the book club have very different personalities and each of them offers the wisdom of her own experience to Jean as she struggles to show her love to her broken granddaughter. Jean and Bailey are both drawn fully and completely and with the third person omniscient narration, it is very easy to follow and sympathize with each of their motivations and feelings towards each other and towards the world around them. They are both realistic characters in need of healing. The way that Scott shows the needs of Jean and Bailey, sometimes in conflict with the needs of the other, is emotionally true and honest. The book has some difficult themes, alcoholism, emotional absence, and raging anger but it manages to retain a lightness to it. While the ending is a bit too facile given the depth of the novel's conflict, Scott has drawn an affecting tale of family, love, and forgiveness. Over all, this is a good and quick summer read, especially for people who love and appreciate book clubs. ( )