Loved this book

This book drew me into it. I appreciated the careful writing and characters with unique personalities who were vulnerable when required but always believable. Each tells their own story woven into the story.

I am giving this book three stars for the writing. The writing is very educated, you can tell the author got a good education on how to write a book but not particularly a talent. Thus to me this story she is trying to sell is masked by good writing, take away the writing and the story is a flop, nothing new, nothing profound. It feels as though the author is trying way to hard to inrtoduce something new and fresh about love and relationships, yet it fails. Honestly, I did not find anything interesting about the main charecters love affair. In fact I was more enthralled with the "heroine's" relationships at work, that could of been a nice story. There was no love in this book, it was just another guy and another girl. Actually, I think that everything around the main character was more interesting then the main character herself.

Great novel for anyone connected to the absurdities and politics of academia.

Often I start thinking about what I am going to write in the Goodreads review near the start of a book, and revise as I go along, making a lot of changes as I get deeper into the story. With this book, what I am about to write has not changed one whit since I started the book:

After I earned my Ph.D. Nearly 28 years ago, I turned my back on academia. So glad.

Smart Novel - a must for romantic bibliophiles

Any author who can work in observations about authors and allusions to some of my favorite titles artfully is going to be on my list of favorites forever.
Part III worried me a bit. It felt as though the protagonist's claims of happiness were irrevocably broken, but I am glad I didn't put it down.
I liked the observations about feminism the most.

Kadish's novel contains many clever turns-of-phrase and inventive moments, and some readers may enjoy the narrator's rumination over actions, events, or statements from other character. That approach, however, often slows the story when it most needs momentum. Worse, it risks diminishing the consequence of its central concerns about gender, relationships, and workplace politics.

Ow. This academic novel cut too close to the bone, what with the internecine struggles and the insinuation that having a nervous collapse will harm your academic career less than taking too long to defend your dissertation (um, see what I mean?). Her academic colleagues seemed pretty stereotypical, although definitely recognizable archetypes.

I've seen it described as smart chick-lit, and I think I resent the notion that any novel dealing with a single woman is inherently "chick-lit" -- paraphrasing the Tolstoy reference of the title, "All happy families are alike and all novels about single women are chick-lit"? I know that's a genre many women enjoy, and I have no problem with that (I quite liked Bridget Jones, back in the day), but it seems like an easy dismissal. So men never worry about getting married and like that? This also supports the protagonist Tracy Farber's contention that it's not considered intellectually respectable to look at happiness in literature -- that it just gets dismissed offhand.

I enjoyed this book, but it was a reminder for me to stay far away from novels of academia until I'm viewing them from a safer distance.

Another random library find. The premise is something I've wondered about and discussed with some of my other reader friends: are happy people inherently uninteresting, and therefore not worth writing about? While the book sounds like (and is) fancy chick lit, I was willing to give it a swing to see if it came to anything worthwhile. Unfortunately, it doesn't prove much of anything, except that happiness is difficult to find, and no one is ever truly 100% happy, except for maybe a brief, shining moment. There is always something to worry about, some conflict to resolve or work past. Our lives are guided by conflict and its resolution, otherwise there would be no push to change, evolve and grow as individuals. While it is perhaps a little glib for Tolstoy to report that happy people are all alike, the underlying principle is true: conflict is interesting. Stasis is not.

Also uninteresting: listening to someone endlessly wittering on about their relationship. Call me jaded if you like, but that gets old quick.

I don't understand how a writer of such obvious talent could write such a mundane book.

This book was *fabulous*. It's about an English prof who wants to write a book about Tolstoy's assertion that all happy families are alike - that's the lie of the title. She posits that happiness is the big scary no-no in literature, and she'll write her book..... as soon as she gets tenure. Meanwhile (of course), she meets a guy - the guy rushes things, there's romance that then goes boom.... I found the intradepartmental workplace tensions much more interesting than the romance storyline, actually. Lots of literary references. Very clever and funny. Amazon seems to be billing this as chick lit, but I totally didn't get that feel from it.

A reviewer coined main character as an ‘annoying academic’, spot on. Very self involved, ruminates details of her life ad nauseam. One redeeming idea was her progression to a flaming, self-righteous feminist to rethinking her total immersion in that ideology once she truly falls in love with a dreaded man and realizes they’re just built with different ingredients. Wasn’t a fan of ‘Weight of Ink’ from this author either.

This book was somewhat unexpected and though at times predictable, there is a lot that I thought I could predict and turned out to be wrong. It is a bit quircky but has a good sense of humor. Though some of the plot ends up being a bit strange somewhere close to the end, it is a good casual read.