Book Review: Dear Debbie by Freida McFadden
Dear Debbie by Freida McFadden is about Debbie Mullen, an advice columnist for her local newspaper, and her life is falling apart. Her teenage daughters are growing distant, and her husband, Connor, is keeping secrets from her. To top things off, Debbie loses her job, and she's had enough ... it's time for her to take matters into her own hands.
I bought this book earlier this year while shopping at Marshall's and TJ Maxx. I didn't even bother reading the synopsis because I typically enjoy the writing style of Freida McFadden, and it was inexpensive. When I finally started reading Dear Debbie, I ended up loving it!
The characters seemed quite typical of a family consisting of a father, mother, and two teenage daughters ... Connor didn't really know what to say to his daughters, and Debbie couldn't understand why her daughters were so distant all of a sudden. And, of course, the daughters, Lexi and Izzy, think their parents are annoying.
Debbie seemed quite likable at first, but I found myself disliking her as the story progressed because her behavior seemed too extreme. I think most people hope that the terrible people in their life will eventually get what's coming to them. However, it's definitely a completely different thing to take the law into your own hands and punish those people yourself, which is what Debbie ends up doing.
Connor comes of as weak and unable to stand up for himself along with having absolutely no motivation to better himself. As the story progresses, I found myself liking him because he starts to actually realize he needed to step up to the plate and take matters into his own hands.
As for Lexi and Izzy, we don't get to know them very much, so I couldn't say whether or not I really liked them because there wasn't much interaction or character development for these characters. But their behavior and attitudes are so very typical of a teenager ... internalizing problems they have and only talking to each other about them.
There was a supporting character that the reader gets to know a little bit better than some of the other characters, and that's Harley Sibbern, a fitness trainer at the gym Debbie and Connor belong to. Harley is the "other woman" in every relationship she's been in and has even broken up marriages previously because she thought the guy was wealthy and could take care of her. I didn't like Harley because of this and her bad attitude of thinking what she was doing was okay. However, she didn't deserve what happened to her.
Freida McFadden definitely had me guessing throughout Dear Debbie because one of the characters is an unreliable narrator. Although I didn't really care for most of the characters in the novel, I felt myself rooting for them to redeem themselves. You'll have to read the story if you want to find out if they did or not. Five out of five stars.
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