The Other Woman

In The Other Woman by Jane Green you get to follow Ellie Black, a young woman with big dreams about her future as a result from her broken childhood. Her mother died when she was only thirteen years old and her relationship with her father has not been the best ever since. It is easy to think that The Other Woman” involves a mistress but I got to know very quickly that “the other woman” is her boyfriend Dan’s mother.

The first time Ellie meets Dan’s parents, Linda and Michael, she is thrilled that she finally has found the family she always dreamed about. Time flies by and when Ellie and Dan become engaged and the wedding plans begins, Ellie starts to realize that Linda is not the mother-in-law she once thought. Is it really normal for a mother to call her thirty-five years old son twice a day or show up, uninvited, in their apartment a Sunday morning at seven o’clock? When Ellie additionally becomes pregnant, Linda will not leave her alone for one minute. Since Dan is her first child, she has a hard time letting him live his own life. The relationship between Ellie and Linda becomes more like a competition about Dan’s attention so Ellie makes him choose one of them. Will it be Ellie or his mother?

Jane Green has succeeded once again with a fantastic novel, heart-warming and heart-wrenching at the same time. It was an eventful and interesting novel so it was hard to put it away and therefore I always wanted to know what was coming next. Even though it is fictional, The Other Woman made me feel like I knew the characters and it was easy to imagine their daily life because of Ellie’s very describing narrative voice.

I find her books very funny and I really liked that the novel gave flashbacks from the present. The book is adapted to adults but I think that older teenagers could easily understand it because of the tame language. It is a novel I really can recommend for the young adults who is looking for novels about love combined with a bit of drama.

Cecilia Hamstedius. Peer corrected by Axel Andersson, Nils Axelsson, Filip Stenegren, and Lovisa Edblad. NATE15