Review: Seven Exes

Seven Exes by Lucy Vine
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Despite loving her job and her friends, Esther doesn't feel fulfilled without a man, especially now she's staring down the barrel of her thirties. So when she reads an article which says a woman will have seven relationships before she finds The One (The First Love, The Work Mistake, The Overlap, The Friend With Benefits, The Missed Chance, The Bastard, and The Serious One). Despite the article being from a old magazine which is no longer in print Esther takes it as gospel truth and determines to track down her seven exes to see whether they could have been The One That Got Away.

Let's be fair, I'm probably too old for the demographic this book is aimed at. To me Esther's behaviour is more that of a nineteen year old than a woman of twenty-nine and after the way she treated some of her exes I am astonished that they would ever speak to her again, let alone want to date her again. Also, Esther seems like an unreliable narrator, not least because she lies to herself about what she's doing and why she's doing it. At one point she tells us that she and her friends were the misfits at school, bullied and ostracised and called names, but one of her exes remembers them as the cool girls looking down their noses at everyone else. Maybe we see ourselves differently, certainly the way Esther frames herself doing her job and how her assistant sees it are two very different things (and I suspect there was an attempt to roll-back some of the rhetoric).

Overall, I just didn't think it was very funny. Esther seemed determined to fall in love with one of her exes regardless of chemistry or connection, and pursued her mission to the detriment of friends and her job.

I received an ARC from the publisher via NetGalley in return for an honest review.

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