My Daughter's Boyfriend

by Cydney Rax

The Georgia Tech Library, with its pitifully small fiction section, chose to stock this. I figured it had to be decent, 'cause if you were a librarian and you could only choose ten fiction books, you'd make sure they were pretty good, right? If not particularly insightful, at least it should be fun. But I was wrong. This book was awful. The characters had as much depth as a wading pool, the prose was purple at best, and the plot was contrived. It was a bad episode of Ricki Lake. I've read books about characters that I couldn't sympathize with before, but this was a whole new level of wtf.

It's about a single mother who decides it's acceptable to have an affair with her daughter's boyfriend. And not make the boyfriend break up with the daughter first. And not be sympathetic to her daughter's pain about the loss of her boyfriend, or that her her mother is dating her ex. And the daughter is good and smart and surprisingly well-adjusted, and we're supposed to believe that this woman was capable of raising her to be this way. And that we would buy any message about female solidarity after she "learns her lesson". The worst part was that the author seemed to spend the whole time waiting to get to the next sex scene - that this whole book was an excuse to write about an older woman getting together with a younger man, but the "stella gets her groove back" plot was taken, so she had to come up with another vehicle.

I wish that I hadn't read this book. The line on the front called it "A fascinating, witty, and though-provoking novel full of memorable characters. My Daughter's Boyfriend is the perfect summer read." It was definitely not witty, but maybe fascinating or thought-provoking in the way of a train-wreck or "so that's how this book could get worse" sense. Definitely not the perfect summer read (see below for fun books that might make that list). I'm also ashamed to admit that I kept reading it, hoping it would get better when I should have known from the line below that it wouldn't. But now there's a new low for other books to be measured against. So, while I want those two and a half hours of my life back, maybe writing this down will help me to remember to steer others away, and to be more cautious about the fiction selection at this wonderful institution.

Only one line from the book, because I'm kind and merciful...

"Her legs opened automatically, like they were electronic doors inviting me to come inside her super-store."