Not as good as the later books. I found this more tedious than charming. This one gets to go to the thrift store.

I picked up a 2021 digital copy of The Good, The Bad, and the Dumped, thinking it was another recent release by Jenny Colgan. I enjoyed The Christmas Bookshop, Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend, and 500 Miles From You and anticipated this would be equally enjoyable. Unfortunately, this was a re-release of a 2010 book, and the quality was decidedly inferior to that of her recent works.

The Good, The Bad, and the Dumped is an over-the-top satirical treatment of the aimless young woman who ripped through her twenties without purpose. Posy is now in her early thirties and seemingly still as flighty as she was ten years ago. When Matt proposes to her, she says “yes,” without knowing why or having a view of what her married life would be like. Realizing this, she decides to visit three of her former lovers to get a clue as to what her life would have been like if she had married one of them. Matt learns of her existential search and puts the marriage planning on hold.

Several factors diminished my enjoyment. First, the description states Matt dumps Posy a few days after he proposed, but that is inaccurate. Matt halted the ongoing wedding planning much later after he learns Posy is uncertain about marrying him and checking in with former boyfriends. The jargon used in describing the London dating scene was challenging to decipher, and the failure to include speaker attributions (e.g., Posy said) made conversations difficult to even when only two people were conversing. The writing and editing were inept (e.g., I counted five places where Posy was spelled Pose). Some humorous elements (e.g., Posy’s unwillingness to say the name of one of her former boyfriends) were not funny and became tedious with repetition.

Finally, readers who struggle through this boring story are rewarded with a blasé ending and a three-page epilogue that alternative “happy-ever-after” endings of Posy to each of her alternative lovers. I liked Posy as she struggled to mature, but this book greatly disappointed me. ( )

This was so 2010. So dated. So aged. The Facebook statuses were hilarious throwbacks. I loved it. Not at all substantive and the emotional depth it tries to go for falls a bit flat but a very readable distraction. ( )

Posy gets engaged but wants to make sure Matt is the right one for her so she goes back and sees her exes to learn why they did not work out.

Reading the blurbs and ads about this book I was expecting something funny but I found it to be a book that was sad. It was sad that Posy had so little confidence in herself that she could not believe Matt loved her. It was sad that she listened so much to others who did not seem to have her best interests at heart. They (her best friend, sister, and mother) were constantly putting her down because of her past failures. They also questioned why Matt would want her--a perpetual screw-up. Matt does not help when she goes off on her journey of discovery. He gets mad and quits talking to her (although I can understand why.) Both need to learn to communicate better. Posy's mother was--well, I cannot find the words to describe her but she did not build Posy up.

I did enjoy the book though it was not what I expected. I found the epilogue interesting. I enjoy reading Jenny Colgan. ( )

Posy Fairweather should be happier after her boyfriend Matt proposes to her, but she wonders if he is really “the one.” She decides to visit her previous boyfriends to make sure she isn’t missing out on anything. Penny has to figure out what and who she really wants, but it may be too late with respect to Matt; when he found out what she was doing, he asked for his engagement ring back.

Evaluation: I found it hard to warm up to this book. There is the usual obsession as in other Colgan books with weight and being thin, which onhy added to the impression of shallowness of most of the characters. Posy herself is whiny and self-absorbed, and it is hard to tell from this book why she would have had any boyfriends at all. She definitely seems to be more interested in the *idea* of a boyfriend or a husband than whoever might be willing to fill the role. In any event, we never got to know any of the characters very well, although from what we were told, I’m not sure that I wanted to know them any better. ( )