Olivia GoldsmithCritiques

Don't get mad. Get everything.
When their best friend commits suicide over her divorce, Elise, Brenda and Annie decide enough is enough. Each was crucial to her husband's career. But now that the men are successful, they've traded in their wives for newer, blonder models.
Over lunch one day they form the First Wives Club. But this is no support group. This is the SAS in Chanel. Painstakingly, inexorably, they plan the downfall of the men who've wrecked their lives - and know that revenge has never tasted sweeter...

Each woman, united in their being spurned by their husbands - often for younger models - and having been to school together, come together after the fourth of their group commits suicide. They then conive to get back all that they think they deserve, having contributed much to their husbands' current way of living.

Much better than the film, (which I dont remember having Diane Keaton's daughter being Down Syndrome, or Goldie Hawn's aging actress being a dignified near 60 year old dypso getting a younger boyfriend, or Bette Midler ending up as a middle aged lesbian) the book is a little harder and edgier - and covers some subjects that mid 90s Hollywood is clearly not ready for.

Not bad, though found some of the secondary characters were light and poorly defined

Annie, Brenda y Elise. Tres mujeres de mediana edad. Tienen historias distintas, distintos caracteres, pero algo en común: las tres fueron abandonadas por sus respectivos maridos. Todas tuvieron que ver cómo aquellos a quienes ayudaron a triunfar las abandonaban por mujeres más jóvenes. Ahora, ha nacido El club de las primeras..., ellos pueden empezar a tremblar poque sólo a los fuertes se les hace justicia.

Es sabido que la vida en pareja no es fácil, pero, ¿qué ocurre cuando las relaciones idílicas se van irremisiblemente por el desagüe? ¿Qué actitud adoptan las esposas cuando comprueban que han sido engañadas, utilizadas y humilladas?
Kam, locamente enamorada de su marido, un hombre vanidoso y arrogante, descubre que éste le es alegremente infiel con su mejor amiga.
Vivian cree que su matrimonio es maravilloso, rebosante de romanticismo y felicidad. Hasta que descubre la cara oculta de su príncipe azul.
Jada está casada con un holgazán y tiene que mantener a toda la familia, y encima la llevan a juicio por abandono de hogar.
Las tres mujeres se hacen íntimas amigas y juntas deciden cobrarse una terrible venganza...

Pandemic read. Fun riff on the publishing industry, back in the day before the world went truly digital.

I cheated by accident and watched the film long before I read the novel, but not on purpose. I didn't even know that the film was based on a book!

Irregardless of any differences between the two mediums and plot changes, I highly enjoyed both. The film is a bit more comedic - largely due to the actors - and the book has a more wide-ranging revenge plan, but they are both centred around themes of female empowerment and the age old adage "a woman scorned..." I hope that this book is able to act as an inspiration for women who didn't grow up with my liberal ideas about male-female relationships, because no woman should be used and abused by a man (or anyone for that matter).

Frothy comedy about second chances, second weddings, and second childhoods.

Phyllis Geronomous, facing 70 and more years of widowhood than she thinks she can tolerate, decides to uproot herself from the Florida retirement community her late husband insisted on, and to move back to New York, where she can keep a better eye on her adult children, none of whom has lived up to her expectations.

Meanwhile, the children, on learning of her plans, fly into various panic modes. None of them wants Mom meddling in their lives at this point, and none can take on the expense of supporting her without dire consequences to their own careers.

The obvious solution, then, is to marry Mom off to some rich old geezer who will keep her happy and occupied. And, with the plot firmly set up, it is expertly manipulated and milked by Goldsmith, who keeps the one-liners coming and stirs hit-and-miss matchmaking together with a cast of delightfully-drawn characters. Most readers will see how all the resolutions tie up into neat bows long before the package is really wrapped, but nobody cares.

It’s a fun read.½

I've always been a big believer of reading the book before watching the movie, but I've seen The First Wives Club movie several times and it's always something I turn on when it's on tv. So I thought the book must be as great as the movie. I couldn't have been more wrong.

The book isn't terrible, it's just not as fun and slap-stick comedy driven like the movie is. Everything is much darker and the things the men do is just repulsive in parts. Maybe it's also the time frame of when it was written (a la the early '90s) that some of the language seemed unnecessary and offensive. You can get your point across without having to use a derogatory term to describe someone. And most importantly, we get it, Brenda is fat. We don't need to be reminded of it every page.

For me, the best part was reading about the husbands and what was coming to them. Ultimately, this book could have been reduced by 100 pages and you wouldn't have missed much. Besides that, I think I'll stick with the movie.

Novel about authors and the publishing industry.

OMG!! This book was absolutely, positively the most boring book I have ever read. 700 pages of crap! I almost did not finish it, but I mad a promise to myself a while back, that no matter how bad the book was, I was going to finish it. This is the first book that made me want to go back on that promise. The only good thing about the book, it that all the horrible people got what they deserved in the end. Maybe it's just not my cup of tea. I like lots of action and suspense in my books and this was definitely not that! Not for me. I would not read again.

Lovely indulgent light read.

Perhaps overlong but then I did have trouble liking the main characters.½

Does it count as 'did not finish' if you read the first third then the last chapter?

Really very very good. Read it years ago, but forgot & now when I rediscovered the author, liked her very much, re-read. So worthwhile. She draws me into her character's lives. Stayed up til 2:30 last night reading 250+ pages. Will finish tonight. Gotta get the movie!!! -- LATER: This is way way better than the movie; that is campy, trying to be funny. Also bought myself a copy of the book. Want to re-read soon.½

Just an excellent, excellent book. I picked it up at the library because I had read her _First Wives Club_ some years ago, & liked it, then had bought _Switcheroo_ & was very pleased with that also. But this one tops them both, and a lot more. Contemporary, in that it deals with the Wall Street disaster that brought on the Great Recession, and appealing to boot in that it addresses women's issues - our proclivity to believe, to love, to "help out", even when that help is confessing to someone else's crimes & when that goes wrong, the someone else not just abandon's one, but turns on them. Not your usual womanupwomanship either, but beating them at their own game, because she always was better than them. Definitely on my to-read-again list; a lot of this one went by the side because I couldn't keep me eyes open, and I couldn't stop reading. Wonderful wonderful book; absolutely highly recommended.½

Just a little paperback, rummage sale, by author of First Wives Club. Interesting premise - guy is cheating on his wife with woman who looks exactly like she did 10-15 yrs earlier. Good read, but not as good as Pen Pals which is Excellent.

A dishy and delightful romp through the publishing world. With overdrawn characters and a quickish pace (though the book itself is much too long) this book is light, easy and fun.

Trashy but fun...a bestseller type book about books! Readable...in other words, decently written.

How can I get the 13 hours it took me to read this back? I should have stopped reading at 30%, but I kept thinking that this is Olivia Goldsmith -it HAS to get better, right?

It was bad enough that you needed a score card to remember all the character's in this dreck book, but the whining of the main character's got me to the point that I had hoped they had all had something terrible happen to them.

Poor them-they are lovely, they are popular, they are making million's - my heart bleeds. Yes they have no privacy, but choosing this career path was, as I said-a choice.

To make matters for me worse, I went to amazon while still on my Kindle to read the reviews to see if anyone thought the same as I did -and one of the reviewers ruined a VERY important plot point.

The book does seem to pick up at the 75%, but by then I was skimming for good parts and it really got interesting at the end. However, it was mostly ruined by Jahnes' whining (love that spelling *rolling my eyes*good grief)

Stay far, far away even though it only costs $2.99 on Kindle and on Nook!

Not knowing what wanted to read I picked this book cause I still love to read books like Queenie,Lace and that kind of thing.

A queenie it was not but it was an enjoyable read. This was written before the internet time but I am sure there is still a lot of cheating going on.

At first it began kinda slow with lots of people having their own chapter but once you get to know them it becomes better and you really start to enjoy it.

Very large book with many pages.

This is "mind candy" - totally without nutritional value, but oh so delicious. A middle-aged woman vies with a "bimbo" over the husband. A fun vacation read.

Olivia Goldsmith does the world of Hollywood well, and this book is no exception. She takes three young women, two new to Hollywood and one child of stars, and follows their trip to and through Hollywood.

The book is fun to read in spots, but in others it dragged awfully for me. The last 50 pages I was gasping for the end. But I'd recommend it to anyone who enjoyed Goldsmith OR Hollywood fiction.

I read this book years ago. I was a fan of the movie and thought I'd give the book a go. The book, in my opinion, was leaps and bounds better than the movie. The stories of each character including Cynthia went much deeper than the movie and it is definitely one i have been pushing onto people who enjoyed the movie.

I liked this book because the premise was that men underestimated their wives and their wives showed them that one should never underestimate anyone. I liked the attitude that the first wives take. It has a bit of man-hating in it, which I don't agree with.

This is an easy read, but very enjoyable. Three women get burned by their respective husbands...and decide not to take it lying down. Not necessarily a how-to-get-revenge guide, but definitely something I'm sure that runs through everyone's mind when going through a divorce.