The Someday Jar
Author: Allison Morgan
Genre: Lifetime Movies/ Romance
Grade: B
Well, last week sure got away from me. The sad thing is I didn’t even really do anything. Last week like so many others just kind of happened… So I thought hey, maybe it’s a good time to review The Someday Jar because Lanie Howard’s life is just kind of happening to her.
She’s happily engaged to a “great” guy in Evan. She’s working for him at his real estate office hoping that he makes her broker. She has a peppy always on your side best friend and a rocky but still relatively good relationship with her mom. What else can a girl want? She can want her Someday Jar- something her father gave her (before he disappeared) where she wrote all her wishes and the things she wanted to do on the back of fortune cookies. Now completing the tasks before her wedding is what she wants more than anything.
Making this slightly more complicated is her relationship with Evan’s all to perfect friend Wes. Complete with awkward meeting alert.
Yeah, I can’t say anything bad about this book but it was so predictable. It’s well written. It moves along at a brisk pace but it was so, so predictable. Evan is a perfect example for me. He couldn’t just be the wrong guy as the signs so glaringly pointed out from the start of the book he had to be a straight up ass. Even when Lanie starts completing her tasks it’s just a series of “charming” events she embarks upon often causing trouble and embarrassment for other people.
I sound like I’m hating on this book which might be a little unfair. It’s well-written. It’s a lark. I love the idea of Someday Jars and I’m big on bucket lists and adventures but there was nothing surprising about this story. Sometimes cute and charming but totally predictable. I have a million “bucket lists” though most of them untouched but now I’m thinking about putting together a book related one.
Recommend: For a person far more romantic than I. I was going to say this might make a good gift for a bridal shower along with an actual someday jar but you should probably make sure the bride-to-be is happy first.
Oh, this plot is actually a pet hate for me. I don’t like the idea of promising to spend your life with someone, while not actually being 100%. But that’s probably just me!
Nope not just you!
I appreciate what you said about Evan. I am genuinely tired of novels where the female is already in a relationship when the novel starts. Instead of them realizing they just aren’t right for each other or they are not in love, the guy has to be some sleaze ball and give the girl an excuse to break up with him so she won’t be guilty for falling in love with someone else. It’s a trope that is exceeding annoying.
Agree. Maybe it’s just my mood but I’d like to read one from the other point of view one day 😀
Do you mean from the man’s POV?
Not necessarily a man. But all these stories usually take place from a certain point of view in the relationship. The person whose going “to find themselves” or to finish a Someday Jar like Lanie. Evan is not a sympathetic character. But I think it would be interesting to read it from the point of view of someone in his position who thinks life is set, relationship good, marriage about to begin and their significant other finds themselves and leaves them in the lurch. Perhaps I’m not expressing it all that well 🙂 It’s just my round about way of saying these stories are getting so predictable and characters like Evan so cliché that alone makes it harder and harder to buy into the book or the story.
No, I feel like you explained it pretty well. I agree that they are predictable and honestly (at this point) unrealistic.
I was reading one novel where a woman was stranded in a cabin with some guy she just met and started to fall for him. She was engaged to another man who actually wasn’t bad in the beginning, she was just overly sensitive. As I am reading it, I told my fiancé how it was all going to play out before I even read it. I was right about every single thing. I couldn’t finish the book because I was so annoyed. More so for the fact that the authors always make the men out to be the villains regardless of what the women do. I am just so angry that people can’t up because they realize it’s not what they want. Nope, somebody has to cheat on the other, etc.
I have read novels with men like the one you described above. However, the authors always make them out to be weak and not “man enough” for the female lead who spends most of the novel treating him poorly.