I was feeling pretty down towards the end of this week, so looking for a light, easy read to cheer me up, I picked up Nine Uses for an Ex-Boyfriend by Sarah Manning.
I know that Chick Lit is a pretty controversial term these days- for me it’s less a term denoting fiction written by women as fiction written by former women’s interest magazine editors who’ve put Cosmopolitan in a food processor and baked the pulp into a novel… But controversy aside, this book sits smack bang in the middle of the Chick Lit genre. Hope is a twenty-six year old teacher, who thinks that life is going pretty well and that her biggest worry is throwing a decent dinner party, until she finds her boyfriend of thirteen years kissing her best friend and has to decide what to do…
The book in itself was okay, if you like lukewarm characters who can’t make their minds up, but really not my cup of tea.The on again, off again relationship was irritating, scenes repeating over and over again. It wouldn’t normally be a book I’d bother writing a blog entry about, but I think it deserves some kind of award for the most misleading blurb and book title ever. I still can see where the title came from but it doesn’t reflect the contents of the book, and the teaser “Does true love forgive and forget? Or does it get mad… and get even?” is completely misleading. I thought there’d be a pleasantly twisted tale of revenge. But really? There was no revenge whatsoever and most of the novel consisted of the heroine busying herself with forgiving and forgetting.
If the contents had matched the title and teaser, this might have been an interesting book, but they didn’t and it wasn’t.
The Book and Biscuit 
Just read the book and I felt so upset and disappointed that I wasted my money buying it. I agree, the title is completely misleading. I thought it was going to be a fun, clever read but instead was frustrating with a completely unrealistic end.