The First Wives Club in The Complete Idiots Guide to the Ultimate Reading List

Aug 05, 2011 Lisa (Harmonybites) rated it liked it

Shelves: contemporary, fiction, novels, humor-and-comedy, chick-lit, romance, ultimate-reading-list

If you've seen the film based on this, well, this is quite different in a lot of the details, and is much raunchier, darker, crueler, meaner and more vindictive. It's a breezy fast easy read despite its thick length, but although light in that sense, I'd hardly call it fluffy.

The novel follows three women: Elise Eliot Atchison, Annie MacDuggan Paradise and Brenda Morrelli Cushman are seemingly very different people. Elise, born to a WASPy rich, high society family, was a glamorous movie star in If you've seen the film based on this, well, this is quite different in a lot of the details, and is much raunchier, darker, crueler, meaner and more vindictive. It's a breezy fast easy read despite its thick length, but although light in that sense, I'd hardly call it fluffy.

The novel follows three women: Elise Eliot Atchison, Annie MacDuggan Paradise and Brenda Morrelli Cushman are seemingly very different people. Elise, born to a WASPy rich, high society family, was a glamorous movie star in the Grace Kelly mold. Annie was the good Catholic "Mainline girl" who is thin, practical and proper. Brenda is a fat brassy, funny half-Sicilian and half-Jewish. But what all three have in common is that all of them are "first wives" dumped in middle age for young trophy wives and betrayed in various ways by their husbands. Elise is drinking too much, Brenda is eating too much, and Annie is trying to cope with crushing loneliness after sending off her teenaged Down's syndrome daughter to a residential home. Then Annie's receives a letter from an old friend, Cynthia, who just committed suicide--a letter that details the various betrayals of Cynthia's husband who had also discarded her for a younger woman. After Annie shares the letter with the others, they form "the First Wives Club" and vow revenge on Cynthia's ex-husbands and their own former spouses.

No one would mistake this book for great literature--I found particularly irritating the hard-to-read attempts at depicting a heavy Spanish accent with spellings like "dey," "ees," "chou," and "asseestant" and the tendency to overuse "Well" to begin sentences. At times what's set in motion by the three seems too vindictive. With the husbands, it's more justice than revenge, but the scheme targets the new spouses too, and in all but one case, the second wives seem to me more the next victim of the ex than evil women who should be taken down.

But I nevertheless found this rather trashy book a very entertaining read and I enjoyed watching the developing friendship among the women and their personal growth after their divorces. Set in late 1980s New York City, the novel is a bit like a caper story for chicks with all the satisfaction of seeing an elaborate revenge scheme come together. ...more

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Oct 07, 2011 Kirby rated it liked it

I hadn't read this book since the movie came out (oh my god- was that really 1996?!), but I remembered loving it. Having just reread it, I may have to knock off one of the stars on my original rating...

I still loved the premise of the story- the discarded wives engineering the downfall of their cruel exes, finding true love and happiness along the way- and I still loved the characters. They all felt very real and nuanced, flawed but likable (especially Brenda Cushman- her humor was great). Some ...more

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