Review: With or Without You

With or Without You by Carole Matthews
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

First off, this book is nearly ten years old and so some of the cultural references are a little bit off and obviously mobile phones have come a long way.

Second, this didn't end the way I wanted it to and so I'm grumpy.

Lyssa and Jake have been a couple for several years and have gone through several rounds of IVF unsuccessfully. Lyssa's obsession with having a baby is not helped by working for a magazine called My Baby where she writes articles about celebrities having babies and cutesy guides to babies' bodily fluids. As the book opens Jake walks out on Lyssa, sick of the constant pressure to have a child that has sucked up most of their savings and all of their time, even making love is a chore when it has to be done to a set time.

At first Lyssa thinks Jake will come back after he's calmed down, but as friends, family and colleagues all side with Jake and tell her that she's been obsessing about babies to the exclusion of everything else, she realises he may have a point. Then she finds out that Jake hasn't gone to stay with his best mate Pip like he said, instead he's shacked up with his glamorous Amazonian colleague Neve, she of the micro-skirts and edgy hair-cuts. Neve is everything that Lyssa isn't, she is even going to climb mountains in the Himalayas whereas Lyssa's idea of a holiday is lying on a sun lounger somewhere (me too).

Realising that mountain climbing might be a bit outside her comfort zone Lyssa decides to go trekking in Nepal instead, but her experiences change her outlook on life. Can she return to London and her old job, her old friends, even Jake, after that?

This is all a bit odd. There's lots of extraneous stuff, like the split from Jake's point of view and his work woes and Lyssa's younger sister's family which never really goes anywhere and isn't necessary. It feels like Neve is just a plot device that is discarded when not needed, I can't understand her motivations for allowing Jake to move in with her. Also, although Jake doesn't come off very sympathetically there's a lot of vitriol thrown at Neve - its always the woman who gets the blame when its the man who strays!

Finally, the scenes in Nepal and the aftermath smack a bit to me of a student who goes trekking on their gap year and then becomes a Buddhist and decides to eschew material possessions, it's a phase we all go through and grow out of fairly quickly. It all sounded a bit preachy TBH.

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