Been There, Married That by Gigi Levangie
Publisher/Year: St. Martin’s Press, 2020
Format: ARC – paperback
Pages: 324
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐
Goodreads
Summary
Agnes Murphy Nash is the perfect Hollywood wife–she has the right clothes, the right career, the right friends, but the wrong hot-shot movie producer husband.
Surrounded by menopausal adolescent moms, TMZ videos gone wild, and a tween with DOATM (Disgust of All Things Mom), Agnes is riding the escalator down to the bowels of divorce hell. Her only way out is to throw a grenade the size of a Beverly Hills diamond onto anyone that gets in the way of taking back her life.
A fabulously fierce and hilarious romp, Been There, Married That delivers an irresistibly outrageous blend of Crazy Rich Asians meets Girlfriends’ Guide to Divorce.
What I thought
Thank you to St. Martin’s Press for the free ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review!
I seem to be in the minority here. While this book was not at all what I was expecting, I did think it was a wickedly funny satire of a Hollywood divorce, which made for an excellent escapist read for the moment.
I won’t lie, I found this rough-going at the start. It took me a while to get used to Levangie’s choppy, almost stream-of-consciousness style. But her little quips and asides and one-liners were so damn funny to me that I felt like I had to keep going.
Once I did get into the story, it really did feel like escapism at its finest. This book 100% read like a trashy Hollywood TV drama, if you’re into those. There weren’t really any likeable characters, although I did root for Agnes, flaws and all, and I did really like Fin. The Hollywood lifestyle here is so over-the-top ridiculous as to be completely unrelatable, but it truly was like a TV show, so ridiculous and cringeworthy that you couldn’t turn away. Side note, I totally pictured Agnes as Kristen Wiig–which probably had to do with Agnes being SO HILARIOUS to me.
All in all, I had mixed feelings about this one. I liked it for its entertainment value, but it really was all over the place. So, if you need something right now that reads like The Kardashians, then yes, I recommend it. But if you, like I did, go into this expecting a heartwarming, redemption story of a rom-com, you might look elsewhere.
Jessika Reads 