The Good, the Bad, and the Dumped
Jenny Colgan
March 23, 2021
William Morrow Paperback
Blurb: We all look up our exes on-line…but should we?
Posy Fairweather is over the moon when her boyfriend Matt proposes in what is probably the most romantic way possible—on top of a mountain, in a thunderstorm, like something from a Nicholas Sparks novel. But a few days later he dumps her. Crushed and humiliated, Posy wonders why all her romances have always been such train wrecks.
Determined to gain some insight, Posy resolves to get online, track down her exes, and ask them. Which doors from Posy’s past should stay closed? Which might open? Can she learn from past mistakes? And what if she has let Mr. Right slip through her fingers along the way?
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After they trudge up a mountain, Posy’s boyfriend Matt drops to one knee and proposes to her. She accepts. She should be ecstatically happy, but she’s not. Why isn’t she happy? This is what she’s always wanted, isn’t it? Jeopardizing her relationship with Matt, Posy starts revisiting her old romances to see just what went wrong, or, how she’s always getting it wrong in Jenny Colgan’s The Good, the Bad, and the Dumped.
The plot is (mostly) a good one, which must be why it seems familiar because we’ve seen something like it with that Ryan Reynolds’ movie “Definitely Maybe” in which a man looks back at his past relationships. And it works. If you can look at the past as a mature adult and allow others to be truthful about their feelings and about you, you can learn a lot. Posy does. But, in some ways, I felt icky about Posy’s romp through the past because it seemed like she was being unfaithful to a good guy who cared about her. On the flipside, she wasn’t certain that she was in a relationship that made her happy (despite the fact that she stayed around). Would the best thing be to marry someone under those circumstances? This is why I waffle about Posy’s quest.
The Good, the Bad, and the Dumped contains a lot of humorous observations, laugh-out-loud snark, and genuine feelings. At the end of the day, however, I just felt like it was missing a little something. Maybe it was connected to the building up of the character with no name, the Lord Voldemort, who I expected to break the shutters off the windows, but alas, I was disappointed. Maybe I wish that the ending had been drawn out a bit better. Yes, there was a grand ending, but there should have been something significant just before it. Maybe I read this too close to The Loveliest Little Chocolate Shop in Paris, which was extremely lovely and invites immediate comparisons.
That said, my let-down is simply from knowing the writer’s other works. The Good, the Bad, and the Dumped succeeds on so many levels and is so much better and funnier than a lot of other chick lit that it would be unfair of me to let you think it wasn’t worth reading. This is still a solid 4 butterfly read.
I received an ARC in exchange for an honest review.
rating:
4 out of 5 butterflies