Reading Lately Book Club: January Pick
can we skip to the good part?
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Happy New Year and welcome to 2024! Thanks for being here!
First a very important piece of business, Reading Lately Book Club is now on IG! Follow and tag us if you’re reading along. And if you want to chat with fellow book club members in a spoiler free way, join us on fable.
Our January Book is The Good Part by Sophie Cousens!
Would you jump ahead to “the good part” of your life if you could?
A quick summary…At twenty-six, Lucy Young is tired. Her dating life is a mess, she’s nowhere near where she hopes to be in her career, and her living situation leaves much to be desired.
After a particularly terrible day, Lucy stumbles across a wishing machine and wishes with everything she has that she can skip to the good part of her life. When everything is sorted.
She wakes up the next morning forty-something years old in gorgeous home, married to a handsome man with two beautiful children working her dream job. Has she really skipped ahead like she wanted, or has she simply forgotten a huge chunk of her life? And as Lucy begins to embrace her new life, she’ll have to ask herself: Can she go back to her previous life, and if so, can she stand to leave the good part behind?
Sophie Cousens’ The Good Part was easily one of my favorite reads of 2023. I found myself laughing or tearing up near constantly. And tearing up turned to full on tears through the last three chapters.
I loved every moment of this beautiful, messy story. To call it a romance (a genre I love) is a disservice to how much more this story is. Sure, it has elements of a traditional love story, but more so it is a love story to friendship; to living life to the fullest and not taking a second for granted. It is magical realism at its best. A perfect book for readers in their 20s/30s who are just trying to figure it out, often wishing we could skip past the unpleasant bits to a time that feels more stable. It is a wonderful reminder that the good part is past, future, and present. It is whenever and whatever we make it. The good part is reading this book and talking about it with your friends.
Let me know what you think when you’ve read it!
Thanks for the tip, Samantha. Been looking for something new to read after my current book.