Jaclyn’s Review: The Jetsetters by Amanda Eyre Ward

The Jetsetters
written by Amanda Eyre Ward
published by Ballantine Books, 2020

find it here: (affiliate links) Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Apple Books, Target, Kobo, Book Depository, Goodreads

Did I enjoy this book? This book was a strange one for me. I started out enjoying this book, but I enjoyed it less with every page turn. By the end of the book, I could confidently say that I didn’t like it. I’m not sure that I’ve ever experienced that with a book before! This book–the plot and the characters–all devolved so quickly that I genuinely wonder if that was the author’s intention. Throughout the book the characters continued to peel back layers of themselves–to the reader, certainly not to each other–and each layer made me like them less. Perhaps this was on purpose? I wanted to feel sympathy for each of them but could not. I wanted to be excited about the final reveal of the story on the cruise ship. The reveal was disappointing (on purpose), and the story itself was awful as well. This book was either a terrible letdown or so spectacularly written that I am too simple to understand its glory.

Would I recommend it? Unless someone can convince me otherwise, I would not recommend this book. The surface read of it just wasn’t that good. I would love a deep discussion with someone who enjoyed this book, perhaps there is something that I am missing?

 

 
About the book – from Goodreads: When seventy-year-old Charlotte Perkins submits a sexy essay to the “Become a Jetsetter” contest, she dreams of reuniting her estranged children: Lee, an almost-famous actress; Cord, a handsome Manhattan venture capitalist who can’t seem to find a bride; and Regan, a harried mother who took it all wrong when Charlotte bought her a Weight Watchers gift certificate for her birthday. Charlotte yearns for the years when her children were young and she was a single mother who meant everything to them. When she wins the cruise, the family packs all their baggage—literal and figurative—and spends ten days traveling from sun-drenched Athens through glorious Rome to tapas-laden Barcelona on an over-the-top cruise ship, the Splendido Marveloso. As lovers new and old join the adventure, long-buried secrets are revealed, and the Perkins family is forced to confront the defining choices in their lives. Can four lost adults find the peace they’ve been seeking by reconciling their childhood aches and coming back to each other?

In the vein of The Nest and The Vacationers, Ward has created a delicious and intelligent novel about the courage it takes to reveal our true selves, the pleasures and perils of family, and how we navigate the seas of adulthood to cruise—we can only hope—toward joy.
 

 
 

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** This post first appeared on Every Free Chance Books (everyfreechance.com) on June 2, 2021.