I haven't finished this book. I went away for the weekend and found it on the bedside table in the spare bedroom. As I'd forgotten to bring the book I was actually reading, this seemed ideal. I hadn't finished it by the time the weekend was over, and I couldn't be bothered to ask if I could borrow it till I had.

Our heroine is 50 year old Eva, fed up with her husband, her borderline autistic twins who have just departed for University, and life itself. So she retires to bed. Her husband, her mother, her mother-in-law are all aghast, but there she stays. We pop along from time to time to Leeds University with the twins and meet their delusional 'friend' Poppy. We go to work with her husband Brian, and see glimpses of his affair. We meet odd-job man Alex, war veteran Stan. All of these characters are larger than life, but none of them gave me the laugh-out-loud moments the book jacket promised.

The central premise, that Eva is completely fed up with being taken for granted, is certainly worth exploring, but I was by turns irritated and bored by the whole thing. But then I didn't get on with Adrian Mole either. ( )

El día en que sus hijos, unos mellizos superdotados, se marchan a la universidad, Eva cruza la puerta de su casa y se mete en la cama en pleno día. No está enferma. No está cansada.
Y, desde luego, no tiene una aventura. Simplemente, ha llegado el momento de decir basta.

The day her 17-year-old twins leave for college, Eva Beaver locks the door behind them, climbs the stairs to her bedroom, and gets under the covers, shoes and all.

She’s tired of being in charge of cooking and cleaning and laundry and bill-paying and everyone’s social life and making doctor appointments and entertaining people she dislikes and gardening and just generally adulting. So when she gets a telephone call, a few hours into her self-imposed exile, revealing that her husband has for years been carrying on an affair with a co-worker, it simply reinforces her plan to simply stay in bed and think about things.

The first half of the book is mostly funny. It’s obvious that Eva has spoiled both her husband and the twins to the point that they are incapable of navigating the quotidian details of life on their own. Brian Beaver’s attempts to prepare a traditional Thanksgiving dinner, via a split-second timetable and a computerized preparation / presentation schedule, goes hilariously awry as he attempts to juggle 17 courses, his mother, his mother-in-law, his lover, his twins, a narcissistic house guest, and assorted neighbors.

As the book, and Eva’s year, continue however, things get darker and one cannot help but wonder why her family continues to cater to her oddities even as they resent the disruption it’s causing. After asking, unsuccessfully, for assistance in managing the realities of her bodily waste, she indulges in a bit of magical thinking that allows her to walk The White Path (a folded sheet, tucked under the edge of the mattress) to the en suite toilet facilities, but still “can’t” get out of bed because she “knows” if she gets up, if she puts her feet on the floor, she will slowly be drawn back into the life she is trying to abandon. With that immediate problem resolved, Eva goes back to bed with the full expectation that someone will continue to prepare and deliver her meals, take away the dirty dishes, and otherwise meet her needs as she concentrates on mining her memories and thinking about things.

Eventually, word gets out about the strange happenings within the household, and Eva becomes a celebrity in spite of herself. This is the point at which things begin to really twist, and the friends and family who have – with varying degrees of enthusiasm – been serving her needs begin to lose their own lives in the service of The Woman in the Bed.

Eva’s connection to reality becomes more and more tenuous even as her husband’s affair collapses and he drifts into a more malignant one and her children’s narrowly-focused brilliance leads them away from normality. The question is not so much whether anyone can rescue Eva as whether anyone still wants to.

Enjoy the humor of the early book, relish the spot-on observations of hypocrisy and family dysfunction in the middle, but be ready for the darkness that seeps into the last third of the book. ( )

just couldn't do it... too frantic, too chaotic ( )

It wasn't a "laugh until you cry" book at all, but I enjoyed the read nonetheless. The book was over the top with just about everything, but not too hilarious or idiotic. I feel like a lot more could have been done with the story, but I still enjoyed reading the book and finished it in almost a day. While not too much was happening, I kept on reading, wanted to read just another chapter. I see a lot of negative reviews, I have no idea if they are all from people who've read the author's other books and feel disappointed because her other books appealed to them more, or not. I have not read any books by her before, and I liked it. ( )