Thin Rich Bitches

Thin Rich Bitches - Janet Eve Josselyn - 1 heart awardWriting negative reviews is even less fun than reading bad books, so when Janet Eve Josselyn asked me to review her novel Thin Rich Bitches, the title alone was enough to give me pause. After reading the decidedly mixed reviews on the net, I wrote back to tell the author that I had a feeling I wouldn’t like her book. She wanted me to review it anyway, so here goes.

Thin Rich Bitches is about a recent divorcée trying to create a new life for herself. She makes a few friends, but finds that that most of the women in the town are – you guessed it – skinny, well-off, and unpleasant. Her new home is overrun by animals, her job is unrewarding, and her love interest seems to be out of bounds – other than the animals, these are fairly typical chick-lit scenarios. Since the book was described as an “uproarious romp through the minefield of female one-upmanship,” I was expecting a huge scene at the end where all of the TRBs ended up in some nasty situation like, I don’t know, all of them falling into a puddle of mud, or being spit at by llamas, something like that. In fact, nothing of the sort occurred; the protagonist gets her revenge in a much subtler and, I’m sorry to say it, completely unbelievable way. (Spoilers at the every end.)

Aside from a believable storyline, what this book lacks more than anything else is an editor. It’s riddled with spelling mistakes and typos – “bulemic,” “he waived me over”, “impeccable dressed” – as well as other, more serious problems. The author seems to have a curious distaste for pronouns like “it,” tediously repeating words and phrases. A typical example: “This is a whole lot better than that over-priced gourmet sandwich shop that was here all last year!” [5 sentences later] “The guy who ran that over-priced gourmet sandwich shop that used to be here…” Similarly, a long, detailed description of a certain kitchen is repeated twice, verbatim, about 75 pages apart. These sorts of things make me wonder if the author was just trying to increase the word count.

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

At some point in the book, the protagonist gets a “brilliant” business idea: start a dog kennel. The reason I find this so ridiculous is that she is living on a farm full of animals that she clearly can’t stand, and yet she decides to open her land to yet more animals which she not only dislikes, but does not know how to take care of. The transformation of a simple dog kennel into an exclusive dog country club is a cute sort of revenge on all the TRBs, but personally, I just never bought into the idea of this person running a kennel in the first place, no matter how many people she hired to help her out.



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