Francesca's Party

I really enjoyed this book and the way that Francesca survives the breakdown of her marriage and comes through with flying colors. The ending was delightful. I am looking forward to reading more books by this author.

I found this book in the dresser drawer of an Irish B & B last week and took it, leaving behind a boring Fern Michaels book that didn't grab my interest. I'm SO GLAD I grabbed this book to read on the plane home! Francesca's Party is a delightfully fun "light read" and held my interest from one end of the Atlantic to the other. There was even plenty to read once I got back to Chicago. The three main characters, Francesca (the jilted wife), Mark (the cheating hubby), and Nikki (the other woman) are all very plausible. Scanlan gives great life to all three with her POV switches throughout the book. I was very pleased with the ending. More, please, Ms. Scanlan!

It's a testament to the strength of Patricia Scanlan's writing that her readers, whether male or female, can empathise with her characters. In this tale of a betrayed wife, we meet a real woman: no Jackie Collins-esque maneater, but a real human being, complete with frailties, faults and vulnerablility. Scanlan manages to avoid the obvious trap of creating a cartoonish lothario in Mark and a martyred heroine in Francesca. Even "the other woman" is portrayed with depth and sensitivity. And that's what keeps you reading. You KNOW these people: you work with them, you live with them, you've grown up with them. You quite possibly might BE them.This is old-fashioned story-telling at its best. No pretensions. No clever-cleverness. Something some of Ms. Scanlan's peers might care to note. In an age where there is a worrying return to the boorish objectification of women (check MTV, magazines and many youth-orientated TV dramas if you don't believe me), it is refreshing to presented with such a credible character in a book. Somewhere out there, there MUST be a TV producer who can recognise the excellent mini-series waiting within these pages. And when that is broadcast, perhaps Scanlan's wonderful "Promises, Promises" and "Mirror, Mirror" will be filmed too.

It took me over a week to finish this book. It was a book that I had a hard time with because in a way it was my life. Though I am not a coporate wife, I have been divorced and I have gone through all of the feelings that Francesca went through.By the end of the book, I felt sorry for Mark Kirwan and Nikki Langan. In so many ways they both wanted things they couldn't have. They both wanted to control their relationship. By the end of the book, Mark went back to being himself where he was taking Nikki for granted just as he had Francesca. My suspicion was that Mark never wanted Francesca to find out about his affair with Nikki. I think he wanted to stay married to Francesca and have an affair with Nikki.Having been a single mom, I could empathize with Nikki. I felt bad for when she realized that Mark was never going to the man he wanted to spend the rest of her life with.I kind of felt sorry for Mark when he had to call his dad and ask for a place to stay after Nikki kicked out, but then I realized it was his comeuppance to stay with Gerald because of the way Gerald had been made Francesca's responsibility after Mark's mother died. Now it was his turn to take care of Gerald.It was great that Francesca got a job, but I had a hard time with her becoming PARTNER with Ken, when it was never stated if she ever went to college or a university. I would like for Patricia Scanlan to a follow-up story and let us know how things worked out for everyone.

Well, I picked this up initially because the blurb on the jacket said that it was like Maeve Binchy. Then I read the first few pages and I was hooked. Because of this book, I did not get anything else accomplished all day! I just lost myself in it, and that has not happened in a very long time. If you like Maeve Binchy, you will LOVE Patricia Scanlon. She writes very real, warm characters, and you can even sympathize with the "bad" ones because they are so well developed and have reasons for their actions. She takes a fairly simple story, that of a woman who after 20 years or so of marriage is shocked to the core to discover that her faithful husband is cheating. How she deals with this and grows over the course of the novel is told in a riveting way....she keeps the reader turning pages, and given that this is not a suspense story, she keeps the tension high, so that you just need to know what will happen next.I will be trying to track down her other books now as I guess she is pretty big overseas, but virtually unknown here. I do not recommend authors lightly.....this is a great, warm pageturner....read this book!