Really Good, Actually by Monica Heisey
Recommended: no
If you want to read several hundred pages of a person’s sad thoughts and self-destructive choices, then I guess this will do it. If you want a plot, anyone likable or relatable, self-growth, etc. then skip it.
Summary
Maggie is fine. She’s doing really good, actually. Sure, she’s broke, her graduate thesis on something obscure is going nowhere, and her marriage only lasted 608 days, but at the ripe old age of twenty-nine, Maggie is determined to embrace her new life as a Surprisingly Young Divorcée™.
Now she has time to take up nine hobbies, eat hamburgers at 4 am, and “get back out there” sex-wise. With the support of her tough-loving academic advisor, Merris; her newly divorced friend, Amy; and her group chat (naturally), Maggie barrels through her first year of single life, intermittently dating, occasionally waking up on the floor and asking herself tough questions along the way.
Thoughts
I’m so glad this is over.
There’s no plot, just a lot of miserable indulgence in sad feelings for about 87% of the time. She and her friends do things that are completely bizarre to me, a person only a year younger then her, like cocaine in a portapotty during a threesome where she’s really just a third wheel. I didn’t enjoy reading this at all, but I wanted to see if it ever got better. It didn’t.
One positive I can find is that the writing itself had some flair and flavor, but sometimes that felt oppressive, like when the witty list of things was taking up an entire page. It was a bit much.
I guess this could be called a character study, or maybe similar to a stream of consciousness in a way, because all we hear are her thoughts on everything (“everything” at this point largely being her divorce) and seeing the way her thoughts and actions are incredibly misaligned and she’s deluding herself in many ways.
My Book Joy 
I didn’t like this one ever since the summary called 29 “surprisingly young” for being divorced. It felt annoying and trite and not at all true. (Source: I was divorced much younger than that, and I didn’t feel “surprisingly young” at the time.) I’m a bit sad to hear that my initial gut reaction to the book matched your experience reading it, though. I had hoped the book would be more fun than the summary.
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It was much worse than the summary, since the summary sounds like something will occur in the book. Yeah there was a ton of focus on her age in general and it was just one more point of annoyance. People thinking turning 29 or 30 is the end of your life 😑
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Oh man. People need to grow up about age. (Yes, I realize how silly that sounds.) I really hate that kind of thing, both in books and real life.
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Oh yikes, this doesn’t sound great! I think the only reason it ever really caught my attention is that there’s something about this cover that just pulls me in. But from the sounds of it, this is one that I shouldn’t pick up, lol. Great review!
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The cover is way better than the story unfortunately. 😅 Kudos to the designer though because I totally agree it’s a great cover!
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