Reviews for Foolish Pleasure

The average rating for Foolish Pleasure based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-12-21 00:00:00 David Dagenais Jennifer Greene is, on the one hand, fairly old-school, but, on the other hand, distinctly not. As usual here we have well-drawn characters: our heroine, Stephanie, is the scion of Boston Brahmins, while our hero, Alex, is decidedly blue-collar (mechanic). At seventeen they got pregnant and got married; it was a disaster. Now they�re divorced and have both put a lot of time and energy into being civil and friendly towards each other for the sake of their now-fourteen-year-old son. When they have a dramatic moment and end up smooching, Stephanie thinks indignantly that Alex clearly has kissed many women since her - and it�s made clear that Stephanie, too, has kissed a heck of a lot of men since breaking up with Alex. The other thing I really appreciate is that Greene is clear throughout that Alex is as much to blame as Stephanie, and that the breakup of their marriage (again, as teenagers) was approximately inevitable because both of them were too young and immature to understand how to be in a partnership. At one point Stephanie calls Alex out on the fact that he hated her Waterford crystal because it was "stuff" and he reverse-snobbery hated that she was obsessed with "stuff" - whereas to her, the crystal was one of the few things she had from her mother, who had died when she was a baby; using it made her feel close to her mother. Neither of them was really capable of being that empathetic when they were so young. Greene is really good at writing teenagers - she has a lot of teenage side characters - and this is the flip side of that: a realistic depiction of how it would work out if two teenagers, who were otherwise decent people, actually did get married. Bonus points for setting it in Hanover New Hampshire and making it actually feel like Hanover New Hampshire.

Review # 2 was written on 2011-10-18 00:00:00 Ruben Macias Jr You can take the DP asshole hero out of Texas, Wyoming or some other cowboy-ish state, but you can't take the asshole out of the hero.