The Jetsetters: A Novel By Amanda Eyre Ward
In The Jetsetters Charlotte Perkins, a 72-year old Savannah widow, enters a contest to win a Mediterranean cruise. She does win and convinces her three adult children, Lee, Cord, and Reagan to join her.
They care for each other but the Perkins family has difficulty openly communicating and all board the cruise carrying their own secret. The story follows the 4 family members as they attempt to put on fronts while navigating various European destinations.
I felt Charlotte was portrayed a bit dramatically as a fragile elder woman — She did, after all, initiate the travel opportunity. I liked Lee and Cord most, though no characters were without flaws. I would have liked the characters more if they had done more instead of primarily thinking about what they wanted to change in their lives.
The Jetsetters isn’t a new premise, but one that I’m often drawn to: family drama — I definitely didn’t love it though. I liked Amanda Eyre Ward’s The Same Sky more than this.
Thank you to NetGalley and Ballantine Books for providing an advance reader copy in exchange for an honest review. English For being the Reese Witherspoon book of the month, it was pretty terrible. The writing was stilted, like a child wrote it. The narrator was not good either. There wasn’t really a resolution for most of the characters so it feels like it was a book about whiney adults who feel bad for themselves. English I don’t like it but I didn’t hate it, too. I’m Switzerland right now. It’s okay reading but not the marvelous book I’ve dreamt of so it means three let’s have a vacation with one of the dysfunctional families stars.
Blurb seemed like interesting and I wished I could read some funny, entertaining dysfunctional, bat-shit crazy family members' stories! But you cannot always get what you want... Sigh... Pour me more wine husband! And stop eating my veggie chips, I'm on a diet, remember! I'm balancing my calories!
Smooth, soft, mediocre, entertaining, beach-side reading for me (even though Halloween, I still enjoy feeling the sea breeze on my face) but it’s not a book I compassionately flip the pages and so intrigued to learn more facts about the characters. I think the progression of the story-telling and presences of unlikable characters didn’t work with me. I found it a little light for my expectations and twisted genre taste.
Charlotte, widow, 70, great prize winner of Mediterranean Cruise, is gathering her family members to join her for the vacation. Eldest daughter Lee has problems to find a proper acting job. When her carrier floats away, she needs to face the secret she kept about their late father.
Middle sibling, Cord, keeping his sexuality as secret and youngest child, Regan, is my most not quite favorite character has a problematic marriage. Her husband confesses once upon a time he fell in love with her sister, Lee.
There are too many dramas, arguments, emotional breakdowns… bla… bla… bla… Final the family members facing their secrets and resentments and we got our unexpected but quiet enjoyable ending. (Actually ending was the best part of the book.)
I didn’t like those family members and I didn’t stand their dramas and their over exaggerated problems. I didn’t find the story as a sincere, poignant, emotional family drama but also I didn’t find this as a chic-lit kind of entertaining, smart reading. But at least I didn’t get bored and the idea of Mediterranean Cruise travels around the marvelous cities of the world is a refreshing plot. (Like last remains of sunshine at the dark and rainy day)
Thanks to NetGalley and Random House Publishing Group to share this ARC COPY with me in exchange my honest review.
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twitter English This book was very mediocre. It is readable but there is nothing memorable or significant about it. I thought it was going to be a light, fluffy, beach read but it was definitely a more heavy read with family drama and some deeper rooted issues. It was not what I was expecting. The cover is cute. English I expected soooo much more 🤷♀️ Not the fun light hearted beach read that I had anticipated .
Charlotte is 71 and is ready to have some fun! Her children have left home, her husband has passed away and well...Char is lonely. She wants to reconnect with her kids and find a hot guy. No really she does, she thinks about it all the time.
So she enters a contest to win a cruise- that just happens to pay for herself and the whole family and she wins...enter lots of family drama, everyone seems to have secrets..which is pretty typical I guess.
I just expected fun, sun and a good little rom-com. I did enjoy this book, it just was a little dry and lackluster for me. The cover is so bright and sunny I thought this would be a little more light and funny. Although there were some funny moments, it was more of a family drama. I had trouble connecting with the characters.
Thank you so much to Ballantine Books/ Random House for this ARC via Netgalley.
English
When seventy-year-old Charlotte Perkins submits a sexy essay to the Become a Jetsetter contest, she dreams of reuniting her estranged children: Lee, an almost-famous actress; Cord, a handsome Manhattan venture capitalist who can't seem to find a bride; and Regan, a harried mother who took it all wrong when Charlotte bought her a Weight Watchers gift certificate for her birthday.
Charlotte yearns for the years when her children were young and she was a single mother who meant everything to them. When she wins the cruise, the family packs all their baggage—literal and figurative—and spends ten days traveling from sun-drenched Athens through glorious Rome to tapas-laden Barcelona on an over-the-top cruise ship, the Splendido Marveloso.
As lovers new and old join the adventure, long-buried secrets are revealed, and the Perkins family is forced to confront the defining choices in their lives. Can four lost adults find the peace they've been seeking by reconciling their childhood aches and coming back to each other?
In the vein of The Nest and The Vacationers, Ward has created a delicious and intelligent novel about the courage it takes to reveal our true selves, the pleasures and perils of family, and how we navigate the seas of adulthood to cruise—we can only hope—toward joy. The Jetsetters: A Novel
READ The Jetsetters: A Novel
The Jetsetters by Amanda Eyre Ward is March’s book pick for Reese Witherspoon’s book club.
This book is about a woman named Charlotte who has 3 grown children. She enters a contest to win a Mediterranean cruise for her and her family to go on. Her hope is that it will bring them all together. She wins the contest and they all go on this cruise. They all have their own secrets/problems that begin to get revealed as the story goes.
❤️Review❤️
I really struggled with this book. This book is a character driven book, which is fine when it’s done well. Unfortunately it was not done well in The Jetsetters. Each family member had an outlandish problem/secret that just made this book really difficult to get through. A lot of their issues are actually really tough and difficult, but they aren’t addressed appropriately at all. Barely any of the characters have any true character growth. Charlotte (the mother) is blind to her children’s problems and will change the subject just to not deal with them. She acts holier than throughout the entire book, but is extremely hypocritical. I found this book to be extremely infuriating the further I got into it. The one positive thing I will say is that the writing was very easy to consume, which at least made the book finish-able. Overall though I had major problems with this book.
1 star: ⭐️ Do you like books when the characters travel in them?
I love books that have a travel element to them. I get to explore somewhere new.
#familydramabooks #contemporarybooks #readingbooks #currentlyreading #destinationreading #vacationreads #funbookcovers #project50books English I HATE not finishing books, but this book was awful and I couldn’t waste my time any longer. Weirdly sexual at times (from the mother character??- didn’t enjoy lol) very choppy, no plot, seemed childish and not what I’d picture to be on Reese’s book list. English A mother, her three adult kids, a cruise ship… each character has their own ‘problem’ that they don’t want to burden their family with. 🤔 I wanted to care more, but this whole story just felt a bit flat to me. I honestly didn’t care about any one character much. It’s not terrible, but not great either. 😐 English Not sure how to rate this book, some parts are a 2, some are a 3, so I guess I'm rounding down from a 2.5
Overall it is super uneven, the pacing is strange--drags in some parts and then the ending is very abrupt. There are too many POV characters and none of them are explored thoroughly enough to make us root for them. It would have been better to have had Charlotte be the main character and then glimpses at the others through her eyes and then tell the truth. But for Charlotte's surprising past, she is an ostrich with her head in the sand where it comes to her children and they don't help matters because they don't ever confront her or face their own struggles or problems head on with her (or even with themselves for that matter). There are some deep issues here--dealing with a hidden suicide, alcoholism, infidelity, and one character struggling with coming out to the family--yet none of them are handled with the depth that the subjects deserve. Because there are so many characters each issue is touched on but isn't emotional enough or deep enough to connect with me as a reader.
So much of the book is completely unbelievable, although I did enjoy the descriptions of the tours they took and some of the history described, it again didn't go far enough to paint a picture and put me in the story. I never felt like I was on a cruise or in Europe.
I don't even know who would really enjoy this--it isn't light enough to be a fluff read, but it isn't deep enough to be a real family drama. The cover is cute and the premise is great, too bad the execution of the premise is not as good as it could have been.
I voluntarily reviewed a complimentary copy of this book, all opinions are my own. English There were so many deep issues in this book that made the story interesting but I felt it was way too breezy/easy summer type read for the heaviness. I think the characters and readers deserved more life and feeling from it. Something about how it was written seemed discombobulated with the seriousness of the traumas the characters were daring with really didn’t work for me. English