I have mixed feelings about "Crimes Against A Book Club".  It made me laugh. It made me like some of the characters. The plot is clever in a modern-day Restoration Comedy way. The women are strong and the men, particularly the old, arrogant, rich men, get what they deserve. Smart references are made to books I've read and enjoyed and everyone lives happily ever after.

So what's not to like?

The basic premise of the book, without giving too much away, is that two women who have child-related problems they lack the funds to address, set out to sell a bunch of rich, apparently superficial, women, over-priced face cream with a special, illegal ingredient.

Our two heroines are, by and large, nice people, one of whom is capable of being very charming. Yet, what they set out to do and how they do it, turns them into predators, abusing the trust of the women that they meet for personal gain.

This is never properly confronted. It is glossed over in a way that tainted the book for me.

In a way, this taint was strengthened when the author showed the rich women to be real people in desperate need of the friendship that our heroines only appear to be offering.

I thought the strongest parts of the book were the ones dealing with how the women in the Book Club reassessed their lives and got their acts together.

It's clear to me that, behind the slick humour, Kathy Cooperman has a good understanding of people and the things that make them betray or redeem themselves. I wish she'd made this the main focus of the book.

What I got was slick plotting and facile humour but the avoidance of real consequences.

This is a fun, light read if you don't let yourself think about it too much. Still, lot's of things can be fun if you don't think about them too much. It doesn't make them worthwhile.

Best friends Annie and Sarah need cash—fast. Sarah, a beautiful, successful lawyer, wants nothing more than to have a baby. But balancing IVF treatments with a grueling eighty-hour workweek is no walk in the park. Meanwhile, Annie, a Harvard-grad chemist recently transplanted to Southern California, is cutting coupons to afford her young autistic son’s expensive therapy.

Desperate, the two friends come up with a brilliant plan: they’ll combine Sarah’s looks and Annie’s brains to sell a “luxury” antiaging face cream to the wealthy, fading beauties in Annie’s La Jolla book club. The scheme seems innocent enough, until Annie decides to add a special—and oh-so-illegal—ingredient that could bring their whole operation crashing to the ground.

Hilarious, intelligent, and warm, Crimes Against a Book Club is a delightful look at the lengths women will go to fend for their families and for one another.

Hilarious and a little bit absurd, I really loved this one!

The plot is so very strange but so very novel and engaging. I absolutely adored the way that it unraveled and how all of the elements introduced in the beginning came together quickly. The plot alone could have carried me easily through this book as I was immensely curious to see what would happen.

But the characters added another whole layer to it. They were all strangely lovable, even the ones that I simultaneously disliked. The manner in which everything came together was quite clever. At times, it reminded me of high school drama books but for adults and it definitely had the cliquey prestige that we all love to hate.

The morals of this book were questioning and questionable and immensely fascinating to me. I was highly entertained by the conflict between Annie and Sarah and how their friendship evolved and changed, as well as by the family dynamic that surprised me near the end.

For a light drama and a fun women's fiction read, I recommend this.

I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I got this as the Kindle Single this month from Amazon. I have to say, I am shocked at how much I enjoyed this book. Maybe because the book at the top of each chapter goes into a book club read and gives you someone's perspective on it. Or I just loved the fact that some of the lines in this book were so freaking hilarious that I laughed out loud. I was actually sad to see the book end. I do have to say the ending was a bit out there, and not believable in the least bit, but I liked it. I think that some things could be tightened up a bit though (sense of time and it would have been nice to get a better sense of some of the male characters in this one). 

The book starts off with two best friends (Annie and Sarah) both coming to a financial hurdle in their lives. Anne is a stay at home mom to three kids. When her son Oscar is diagnosed with autism and she is told how much it's going to cost her family to deal with one year of treatment for Oscar ($80,000) she is justifiably worried that there is no way for her family to deal with this cost on top of their mortgage and other bills.  

Sarah is dealing with IVF treatments. She and her husband Michael are trying to have kids. However, due to Sarah's high pressured job (she's a lawyer trying to make partner) there's a worry she's too stressed out to get pregnant. When she finally quits her job (in a hilarious freaking scene) she realizes that she doesn't have the cash to keep paying for the treatments.

Enter the plan. Annie has gone to a book club and realized that these 1 percenters would pay thousands ($2,000) for a facial cream that makes women look younger. Due to Annie being a chemist, she puts together several different types of facial creams and mixes in a secret ingredient (no spoilers) and then uses the fact that Sarah looks a decade younger than her age to push the facial cream first to their book club friends and others.

Can I say though that out of the gate I had real sympathy for some of the book club crew. We delve into each women a little bit here and there along with Annie and Sarah. You get to see in some cases grossly unhappy women who are doing what they can to keep their husbands interested. In other women's cases, they are doing what they can to start all over again after being traded in for a younger model. 

I did enjoy Sarah more than Annie. I felt out of like with Annie once we find out about her secret ingredient. Her reasoning behind it was total crap. And I hated that Annie sat around being judgmental about the other women and even Sarah to a certain degree. The two friends do have a falling out, but I was glad that Sarah let Annie have it. She needed it.

I honestly thought that the book worked very well together. I do have to say that the flow was a bit off here and there though. And as I said the ending was not believable at all, but I enjoyed it. I do think that the timeline situation should have been tightened up though. At one point I was reading and someone goes that so and so was 7 months pregnant and I went, wait a minute, they met when she announced she was pregnant, does that mean it's been like 4 months? I just needed the timeline spelled out a bit better. 

Which I forgot to post until the month was almost over.