MY EX-HUSBAND'S EX-HUSBAND, clever, witty novel about something I bet has already happened

MY EX-HUSBAND'S EX-HUSBAND
RACHEL COHN & MELISSA de la CRUZ
Little A (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$16.99 paperback, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From New York Times bestselling authors Rachel Cohn and Melissa de la Cruz comes a freewheeling journey through Vienna where two estranged friends search for their mutual ex—and a long-lost bond.

Audrey and Ian were best friends—until they fell in love with the same man. To be precise, they fell in love with, married, and divorced the same man. And there’s no coming back from that.

Twenty-odd years later, they’re right back at the beginning: Vienna, where their university study abroad turned into a love triangle from which they never quite recovered. But it’s Christmas, and Audrey’s daughter is getting married. Time to let bygones be bygones.

Not for the sake of the holiday or even because they’ve matured with age…but because their mutual ex is nowhere to be found. It’s up to Audrey and Ian to track him down.

As wedding plans go further awry, the former besties race to find the father of the bride. Juggling complicated family dynamics (and the cocktails required to cope), they learn that, sometimes, it’s not about the search but the friendships rediscovered along the way.

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My Review: A Yuletide wedding has only one thing going for it that I can see: no way to forget the date. Making the wedding itself a destination wedding? In Europe, where you need a passport and a pile of cash to travel? Well, we know already who these folks are hangin' with. Not the likes of my broke-ass self.

But let's go with the fantasy. I love a holiday romantic story. The set-up for this one's irresistible...Ian and Audrey having to solve the problem of their mutual ex-husband, the deeply self-centered borderline narcissist Beau—aptly named thing of beauty and a boy forever—ghosts Izzy (Isadora, as in Duncan) their daughter/stepdaughter on her Christmas wedding day. This is far from the first time he's behaved this thoughtlessly to either of them but they're willing to rally together to keep him from ruining their dear Izzy's slapped-together last-minute dream.

It's a romance, there is no mystery about the Happily Ever After. It's all the banter and shenanigans that make it fun to read.As Audrey and Ian mobilize to get Beau's butt where he said it would be for once, they rekindle their own badly damaged trust in each other. It's that relationship that each of them really missed, really values.

Told in alternating first-person chapters as the hunt for Beau takes the two recovering co-dependent besties from pillar to post and back again, the story sees them heal their fractured lives, their fractured friendship, and their mutual step/daughter's wildly impulsive disaster in the making. Izzy's choice of husband, her younger daughter Max's choice of a life, her testy, curmudgeonly ex-mother-in-law's rudderless aimless bad mood...Audrey's love life and Ian's love life, Beau's jerk personality all fixed as well.

It's a romance, the spoiler would be telling you *how* not *that* it all works out! I was pleased to be along for this goofy ride because, as each corner was turned, I thought "oh sure, that makes sense" exactly never. Instead I was treated to improbable, amusing solutions to the entire crew's problems. Hey, this is a wedding for two young Americans in Vienna, Austria, at the city's busiest time and there's no scheduling conflicts. This is not reality.

But it sure was fun.

THE GUNCLE ABROAD, sequel...with a knowing wink...to a surprise hit

THE GUNCLE ABROAD
STEVEN ROWLEY
G.P. Putnam's Sons
$29.00 hardcover, available tomorrow

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From the nationally bestselling author of The Guncle comes the much-anticipated sequel, in which Patrick O’Hara is called back to his guncle duties…at a big, family wedding in Lake Como, Italy.

Patrick O’Hara is finally in a league of his own…professionally. Inspired by his stint as Grant and Maisie’s caretaker after their mother’s passing, Patrick has "un-stalled" his acting career with sit-com, Guncle Knows Best. Still, some things have had to take a back seat. Looking down both barrels at fifty, Patrick is single and lonely after breaking things off with Emory. But at least he has family, right?

When his brother Greg announces his big, second wedding in Lake Como, Italy, Patrick feels pulled toward Grant and Maisie and flies to Europe to attend the lavish event, only to butt heads with a newfound Launt (Lesbian Aunt), curb his sister Clara from flirting with guests, and desperately restore himself to the favored relative status in the eyes of the kids, as they struggle to adjust to a new normal. But is it Patrick’s job to save the day? Or is simply celebrating love enough to quell the family chaos?

Gracing the page with his signature blend of humor and heart, Steven Rowley delivers the long-awaited sequel to a beloved story, all about the complicated bonds of family, love, and what it takes to rediscover yourself, even at the ripe age of fifty.

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My Review: Teenagers. Yikes! Maisie's dad is getting remarried to a Very Glamourous Italian, which is NOT a way to a bookish teen girl's heart. Grant is eleven, doesn't really have a lot of interest in the wedding parts, but will—he thinks—definitely prefer his life without an Italian marchesa for a stepmom, since Maisie's churned those waters. The gruesome twosome turn to their truly belovèd Guncle Patrick, their Dad's big brother, for help stopping what they see as impending disaster.

Guncle ("gay uncle" if you need a refresher) has, in agreeing to "help" them, got a plan. The issue with plans is that teenagers, with their fully adult-strength emotions and complete absence of perspective, most often see through plans and get...stroppy...when they feel manipulated.

Clever Guncle...take the kids on a European tour, since he's already finishing up a film role in London, and talk to them...remember "Guncle Rules"? now they're "Love Languages"...while working through their fears about their Dad moving on from their Mom's early death. It will, not coincidentally, help him move on from his recent breakup with Emory, whom I feel sure we've all forgotten from The Guncle. At any rate, it's a welcome distraction from the entertainment business for a successful...again...sitcom...again...star, and a man about to turn the Big Five-Oh. Yep, the guy who found being loudly reminded by his loving niece that he was forty-three tantamount to a hate crime is a half-century old.

Does his wiliness now exceed his willingness to be there for his family? Close-run thing if you ask me.

Well, Rowley's still got his humor vein open. I loved this bit:

“Sequels are either too bloated, too stuffed with B-team actors or characters or Ewoks—things that weren’t good enough for the original. A cash grab to profit off something that was probably a fluke in the first place.”

Cassie glanced at the surrounding patrons, perhaps wishing she could dine with one of them.

“The only time it maybe works—and I mean the only time—is when there wasn’t an ending that was entirely happy, when not everything was tied up in a neat little bow. Otherwise you have to undo someone’s happy ending to create more drama for your characters, and no one likes a happy ending undone. And what stories these days don’t have happy endings?”

Thus Patrick to his long-suffering agent...and Author Rowley tipping his hat to the audience. It's not the first time I've been here, so pay me the respect of telling me you're aware of that fact. I appreciated it, and was simultaneously amused by it. It joins the host of amusing moments that this whirlwind tour of Europe that must be completed in time for the destination wedding on Lake Como...shades of Patrick Dennis and Around the World with Auntie Mame, another sequel that has to undo a happy ending...and you get a fun, funny summertime escape in book form. That is a wonderful lot.

Of course, this is not the first time we've met these characters, so there's a lost sparkle that can't be recreated no matter what one does. In its place is a luster, the warm burnished glow from a fine silver samovar, one that always spills its tea warmed to perfection into your perfectly prepared cup. Sweet...the return and humanization of oldest sister Clara in her latest reinvention of self...bitter, Patrick's jealousy of the marchesa's lesbian sister who woos her way into Maisie and Grant's affections...fun, the comical nightmare rehearsal dinner like something from The Philadelphia Story, only...um...earthier, and honestly de trop. Tropes. Well polished, gleaming tropes that most story-loving readers want to read because they are familiar and dear and relatable. What story about a wedding that deserves one's attention at all doesn't feature some concatenation of mishaps?

The utter charm of how the world rights itself in romantic fiction is a source of delight.

Come be delighted. (But dear GOD, the w-verbing has got to stop!)

BEST MEN, gay-male romcom light on rom but very well supplied with com!

BEST MEN
SIDNEY KARGER
Berkley Books
$17.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: When two best men in a wedding party fall for each other, they realize love isn't a piece of cake in this hilarious and heartfelt romantic comedy debut by screenwriter Sidney Karger.

Max Moody thought he had everything figured out. He's trying to live his best life in New York City and has the best friend a gay guy could ask for: Paige. She and Max grew up next door to each other in the suburbs of Chicago. She can light up any party. She finishes his sentences. She's always a reliable splunch (they don't like to use the word brunch) partner. But then Max's whole world is turned upside down when Paige suddenly announces some huge news: she's engaged and wants Max to be her man of honor. Max was always the romantic one who imagined he would get married before the unpredictable Paige and is shocked to hear she's ready to settle down. But it turns out there's not just one new man in Paige's life--there are two.

There's the groom, Austin, who's a perfectly nice guy. Then there's his charming, fun and ridiculously handsome gay younger brother, Chasten, who is Austin's best man. As Paige's wedding draws closer, Max, the introverted Midwesterner, and Chasten, the social butterfly East Coaster, realize they're like oil and water. Yet they still have to figure out how to coexist in Paige's life while not making her wedding festivities all about them. But can the tiny romantic spark between these two very different guys transform their best man supporting roles into the leading best men in each other's lives?

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My Review: Max, 35, is Old. He tells us so himself. As I am damn near twice that age, I got right tired of hearing that nonsense. Max has a disastrous love-life. Max has one friend, Paige, for most of his life, and she is what I would call a collector: someone who gets a lot of people into her orbit and then keeps them there without paying a lot of attention to them. Max himself points this up by mentioning their friendship habit of going to a specific diner and Paige does the same trick of focusing all attention on herself with even the waitstaff...who, like Paige, basically ignore Max.

I am familiar with this kind of "friendship." It happens to a lot of gay guys I know, not the best-looking, not the most outgoing, but who still crave affection and settle for this dark twin of it because it's obvious that the friend is doing them a favor. It's so pervasive in Max's life that he has a friends-with-benefits deal going with his ex...who literally makes the booty call and then tells Max he just needed to get off before his date with the new guy in his life so he wouldn't come across as too sexually demanding!

It's all Max knows, being second-best, so he rolls with witty sarcasm as his defense mechanism. There are lists and texts and all sorts of not-story documents larded in to this too-long but very relatable story of modern friendship among the generation where gay is just a thing you are. These are the people who piss off the old white men who wear traitorous flags to show what patriots they are the most. It's not important that anyone is gay until Paige gets among the older people she needs to make herself different from.

I liked the snark, I liked the honesty about Max's Paige-provided employment and its soul-sucking banal cruelty...which Max is a big part of delivering!...and I liked the scene on Fire Island with Max as the very, very obvious fish out of water. I got no chemistry to explain why Max and Chasten were into each other, it seemed to take forever before anything happened and then it was as though they'd never been at odds or felt aggrieved by the other's presence in Paige's court of admirers. Shall we say there's no real tension resolved and be as discreet as Max himself is about details of his more lurid energies. The narrative is all-Max all the time and for over 300 pages it's a kind of strange thing that we never once see anything but the barest surfaces of Max's responses to anyone.

Self-loathing ≠ introspection.

I'd've preferred a shorter version of the story, or more delving into the real feelings behind Max's witty, bitchy narration. It's okay as a com, but the rom part left me wondering what more there was to all these characters. What makes the read fun is the snark; what needed moe thought was the length. I'll be on the lookout for Author Karger's next book with high hopes.