User Reviews
Rating: really liked it
this would’ve been 100x better if nina and lola had realised that men sucked and then fell in love and had a happy lesbian life making cool recipes and living in london
Rating: really liked it
There’s a particularly heinous level of hell reserved exclusively for single women in their thirties. If you’ve visited it yourself, you know. And if you haven’t, Dolly Alderton has written a book to give you a tour.
In Ghosts, 32-year-old Nina Dean is a confident, independent, successful cookbook author. Societal pressure to couple up and lock in a baby daddy before her biological clock goes ding sends her to a dating app, where she meets her match in Max. After months of dating and his profession of love, he ghosts her. Just disappears without an explanation. Vanishes into the ether. Dropkicks her from the heaven of new love back down to the aforementioned level of hell.
Perhaps because I could relate to Nina so much, reading about her experience was PAINFUL. I had a pit in my stomach and truly felt her emotions right along with her. She also has to contend with her smug married friends (as Bridget Jones would call them), who are leaving her behind in a wake of soiled nappies and suburban lawn clippings.
Somewhat oddly, the publisher seems to be pushing Ghosts as a romantic comedy. Years from now I don’t think I’ll remember the comedy, and I certainly won’t recall any romance. But what I will for sure remember is how the author expertly captured one very specific aspect of the modern human experience.
4.5 stars
My thanks to Knopf Doubleday and the author for providing me with a gifted copy to review via NetGalley. Ghosts is now available.
Blog: https://www.confettibookshelf.com/
Rating: really liked it
Let me introduce you to Nina George Dean - the middle name in honour of George Michael who was number one when she was born. She’s 31, single and a successful food writer. Using dating app ‘Linx Online’ she meets Max - sturdy, rumpled, he declares he’s going to marry her on their first date. Her dad is disappearing to dementia, her mum is rebranding herself, her best friends are Lola and Katherine, other friends are settling down, marrying, kids, the whole nine yards.
I thought I’d like this book as I enjoy Dolly’s Sunday Times column but I didn’t just like it, I love it. It’s so clever, acutely observed, reflective, funny yet so sad at times, it’s real, full of hopes and dreams, trust and loss of trust - all the illusions and delusions of life. Thee are so many ghosts in Nina’s life such as those who ghost you online, the ghost of who her father was and his relationship with her and her mother, the ghost of your twenties self and of friendships, the ghosts of your plans and the life you thought you’d have. Her father’s dementia is described so movingly and accurately as my father similarly became a poor benighted ghost and what really strikes a chord is Nina’s belief that no human can be deleted. The characters are great too, Nina is fantastic and deserves more, I love her memories of the safety of childhood and treasuring of her father. Lola is a terrific character too and I love her brand of wisdom which is comforting. There are moments when you feel Nina’s hysteria such as her reluctant attendance at a weekend hen do ( pins and eyes!) and oh yes, Prosecco is true venom. The end is perfect and Nina just ‘Gotta to have faith, faith faith’! Couldn’t resist.
So, overall, I think you may have guessed this is an easy five star book for me, a fantastic read and hard to put down. Highly recommended.
With thanks to NetGalley and Penguin for the much appreciated ARC
Rating: really liked it
Nina George Dean is a 32-year-old single food writer living in London and slowly watching her pool of friends marry off and grow their families. Having a more feminist mindset, she doesn’t need a man to complete her, but nonetheless, has the same desire as many for her own family and person to love, if life chooses to bring it her way. Enter the Linx dating app and her match made in heaven, Max.
Max is handsome, kind, supportive, stable … everything Nina could hope for. Their sexual chemistry is off the charts and they spend every moment they can together for three months, even reaching the epic moment when Max says “I love you” and she returns the sentiment.
Then … it’s over. He stops responding to her texts and calls. The weeks drag by. She’s been ghosted by the man of her dreams. The “will they, won’t they” end up together question? I’ll leave that to the reader.
This book has been marketed as a romantic comedy, but as much as I liked it, and I really did for the most part, it feels like a mislabel. It does have plenty of humor and charm, and Alderton’s writing is fantastic, but there’s an awful lot of sadness and tension in this for me to go along with that categorization. Nina’s beloved father, Bill, recently diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, has a fair chunk of the story highlighting the disintegration of his thinking and personality, as well as Nina’s mother, Nancy’s, dysfunctional response to it. Alderton did an amazing job of portraying it - and the stress it puts on the family - in a realistic light, but it was way too serious for a book marketed as comedy. It felt like two competing stories happening … the one with Nina and Max and the one with Nina and her father.
There are other issues happening in the book as well: the distancing relationship she has with her childhood best friend, Katherine, navigating friendship with her recently engaged ex-boyfriend, Joe, and her toxic relationship with her downstairs neighbor, Angelo. Regarding Angelo, his inclusion in the book and an event involving him at the end, is my one big black mark against it, and I really can’t make sense of why the author went there, despite the book’s explanation.
Plot and believability issues aside, I loved the writing and was completely engaged in the story, and I would absolutely read another book by this author. I just hope the next time around is a little lighter!
★★★ ½ (rounded to 4 for the excellent writing)
This and all my other reviews can also be found on my blog: https://acuriouskatreads.blogspot.com/
Thank you to Knopf Doubleday Publishing, Netgalley and author Dolly Alderton for this ARC in exchanged for my honest opinion. This will be published August 3, 2021.
Rating: really liked it
does this book have flaws? most certainly. however, as someone who was recently mistreated by a "too good to be true" dating app match, i was all too willing to look past them. Nina is a protagonist you want to root for simply because men are trash, but the most compelling parts of this book are the friends she is surrounded by, and the shifting dynamic between Nina and her parents as her father's health declines and her mother struggles to cope.
Rating: really liked it
I wanted to like this book a lot more than I did. It tries so hard to strike that good balance between serious commentary on relationships and ageing as well as humour and kitschy romance- but it just wasn't there for me. Especially the relationship development toward the end of the book (which I won't go into in full detail- but let's just say it was VERY out of the blue and VERY weird). The book deals with ghosting of many forms, from dementia to dating apps, and the story of Nina and her family was perhaps the best part of this book for me, but the other factors disappointed me a lot.
I thought as well that the main character had *some* substance, but honestly not enough- it was this generic approach to the millennial main character who didn't really voice as much of herself as she could've. I wanted a lot more of the vulnerability in this book, and less of the speedy relationship and the complete lack of closure. I get that was partly a commentary on the whole idea of ghosting, but do men really vanish after proposing marriage so often? And some of the commentary about this generation being raised by PlayStations was just weird as hell. I don't know, maybe I'm missing a part of the puzzle, but this book just didn't bring it all together for me.
Rating: really liked it
Thanks to Netgalley and the publishers for an advanced copy of this novel.
My opinion of the book is conflicted due to the conflicting feelings I felt when reading it. It was well written, modern and pretty relatable. I easily found myself in the main characters shoes, her annoying friends annoyed me.
However, overall I found it somewhat depressing . This could be because I am similar to the main character in terms of things such as age and being childless. Perhaps that meant that I took the content too personally, however I usually enjoy being able to relate to a character.
Rating: really liked it
Nope. Not for me.
A vapid 2020 Bridget Jones with a great effort made to sound like Nora Ephron (Alderton wrote the foreword to the new edition of I Feel Bad About My Neck, she's a big Ephron fan.). The highlights of the book were Nina's changing relationship with her childhood best friend Katherine, and her response to her dad's illness.
Nina writes cookbooks, but in a whole year-in-the-life we didn't see her cook as much as an egg. I don't think pouring condensed milk over a banana counts.
There was such a big deal made out of Nina's middle name, and I did not understand this at all. I don't know if that's just because I don't have a middle name, but I really didn't understand how so much of her identity seemed to be wrapped up in the origin story of her middle name.
The biggest disappointment that I had with this book was the one-sentence rant/quip about a cis woman putting her pronouns on her social media "even though she's never been in danger of being mis-gendered(sic)". I really thought that Dolly Alderton would know that it is helpful for cis people to display pronouns because it normalises doing so for trans and non binary people.
Rating: really liked it
Crammed with unlikely occurrences, asinine dialogue and excessive meandering, Dolly Alderton's "Ghosts" quickly descends from a reasonably promising piece of fiction into a tiring farce.
The story is narrated from the perspective of its main character, Nina George Dean, a single, thirty-two-year-old food writer, whose middle name was given to her in honour of George Michael (an uninteresting fact that is mentioned a needless amount times throughout the book). The novel follows Nina as she pairs up with her last single friend to embark on a quest of finding romance through dating apps. While this appears to be the story's premise, only a fraction of the book's writing is dedicated to Nina's brief relationship with a man she meets on a dating app. Instead of the novel having a plot, it has several subplots running together that bear little significance to one another. Each of these subplots lack development and they mostly just labour the point of how people or things in Nina's life have changed since she was younger.
Weak characterization and nonsensical dynamics between characters are another flaw of this novel. Some of the absurd connections between characters include Nina being best friends with her ex-boyfriend and his fiancé, Nina's dating app boyfriend being enamored with her to suddenly not texting her back, Nina having an unrealistically belligerent nextdoor neighbour, and Nina eventually having sex with that neighbour on her kitchen floor during a confrontation that nearly escalates into a brawl. The characters themselves really lack depth and individuality, and are mostly just clichés of thirty-something-year-olds who are torn between wanting to settle down and wanting to maintain their youth.
The only parts of "Ghosts" that are any bit perceptive or that pique the reader's interest, are the sections that critique the trivialities of modern lifestyle and dating. So much so, it's almost as if Dolly Alderton stitched a dozen of her weekly Sunday Times columns together, forced a limp narrative around them, and then called it a novel.
Rating: really liked it
I am convinced that Dolly Alderton could write a shopping list and I’d find it the most relatable, evocative and thoughtful thing I’ve ever read.
Bloody loved this-it’s everything I wanted her debut novel to be and more.
Rating: really liked it
4.5
As much as I was telling myself that I was getting a bit tired of reading contemporary books written by Millenials about Millenials, I couldn't stop myself from placing a hold on
Ghosts after reading some reviews and watching an interview with the author.
If I hear anyone say that sexual orientation is a choice, I will just send them to hear women's dating stories. It makes no sense that women would put themselves through all the BS to be with half baked, men- babies, who can't commit to a pair of socks, who always think the grass is greener, while they put almost no effort in a relationship (#NotAllMen) - and that's the "good guys", "the good on paper guys".
I liked this book from the very beginning. The narrator is Nina Dean, 32 years old, a food writer, who has finally decided to join the online dating game, after two years in the singledom, following the breakup of her long term relationship. Nina is quite content - she's got a job she likes, a mortgage, she's attractive enough, but she'd love to find a partner, maybe start a family. I mean how dare she? ;-) Enter the dating app
Links, where one swipes left and right, through a multitude of potential matches. I enjoyed some of the observations she makes about dating, apps, the type of people on dating apps and so on. And wouldn't you know it, she strikes it lucky on her first date. Max is 37, an accountant, super tall, with rugged outdoorsy skin, curly dishevelled hair. He even reads. Books. The literary fiction kind. And he says the right things without seeming too sleek or sleazy. Nina - one of the most level headed female characters I've come across in novels by and about young women - falls in love.
Meanwhile, on the family front, things are not going very well. Her beloved father, now in his seventies, has dementia and is getting more forgetful and confused. Nina's mum, who's not terribly close to her, is not on the same page regarding her husband's care. It's hard for everyone.
Alderton wrote a very relatable and readable novel that looks at relationships in all their many forms - friendship, familial, amorous, even neighbourly. She takes a good look at ageing and loss as well. Unlike other novels I read in recent years, Alderton didn't go for the shock value, for the overtly descriptive sex acts and obviously weird characters. I also liked that, for a change, our main character is not a damaged young woman (I mean we're all damaged in some ways, but she doesn't have any traumas that needed addressing).
Anyway, I'd better finish this overly long review. Thanks for reading my ramblings.
NB: The audiobook narrator did a great job. The only thing the bugged me was that the Italian neighbour's accent sounded Balcanic and not Italian in the least.
Rating: really liked it
I loved
Ghosts, a contemporary fiction story about Nina, a 32 year old living in London who has a pretty good life — She owns her apartment, is an author with her second book publishing soon, and has a good relationship with her ex-boyfriend. She isn’t bothered by being single but decides to give dating apps a shot.
Nina meets Max and they hit it off well on their first date. Max seems like a great guy but when he ghosts her, Nina must face all of the unglamorous things going on in her life — Her father’s declining health and her mother’s refusal to accept it, her ex-boyfriend’s serious relationship, tension with her best friend, her editor’s criticism of her third book idea, and the lingering, unanswered question of why Max ghosted her.
Ghosts story was modern, relatable as a millennial, and had a good amount of humor throughout the story. Many of us have at least faced some of the things Nina endures and I liked her a lot as a main character.
Rating: really liked it
My Rom-Com friends, this book is insanely fun. Dating in your 30's is unfamiliar territory to me since I married my HS sweetheart, but I enjoyed reading the scope of the later Gen-x's dating process.
"It's easier, being heartbroken in your thirties, because no matter how painful it is, you know it will pass. I don't believe one other human has the power to ruin my life any more."
Nina George Dean, named after George Michael, uses her wit and humor to get through some difficult times. Her friends have all joined the ranks and settled down to the "married with kids" profile and she has all the feels but single. When she meets Max online, he tells her I will marry you one day! Wow!! It's happening!! Plans are made! Her theme "Yeah yeah yeah....Laala la-la-la" "Edge of Heaven" 🎶 Wham
Now, we have a runaway groom. Max takes ghosting to a whole new level with no texting, phone calls or appearances with no explanation. He is gone..... The book is full of ghosting. Friends that have ghosted their bonds, due to misunderstandings or simply too busy with their own lives. Her dad has ghosted the strength of character she grew up knowing when alzheimer robbed him. Her ghosting online and the plans she once had. Her mother's ghosting by denial of duty to support her father and changes her persona of outward appearances.
Even with her rich inner feelings being displayed with humor, the underlying tones are heavy, so it's
a lot of build ups just to be let down. She has some exceptional friends that see through her facade and celebrate the goodness of their times together. I absolutely loved this even though the emotions are heavy I loved the writing and style of words displaying awareness of all Nina's emotions.
Thanks NetGalley for this digital copy in exchange for my honest opinion.
Rating: really liked it
i cried and i laughed, it was really enjoyable and even though i’m not 30 i found it extremely relatable.. scary relatable, i loved the ending tbh
Rating: really liked it
I felt pretty conflicted reading this one. Nina is so relatable, it was easy to feel every emotion right along with her. However I found the plot slow moving and a little boring. This isn’t your run of mill romance as there are serious themes but it didn’t go as deep as I was expecting and felt a little clunky.
