Fb2 The Anglophile (Red Dress Ink Novels) ePub

Thirty-five-year-old student Shari Diamond has a penchant for all things British. She meets fellow linguist (and super hot Brit) Christopher T. Brown -- Kit, for short -- by chance in Chicago, and there begins her romance and the perpetuation of her incredibly potent fetish. Kit and Shari become inseparable, making a jaunt from New York City to London in no time. But in his native land, Kit seems to have a whole lot of secrets -- and Shari has a whole lot questions without answers.

I went into this novel with such high hopes. As someone obsessed with British culture and language and a devoted reader of chick lit, I thought this novel would marry all of my favorite things in one nice, pleasant package! I wasn't expecting The Great Gatsby, but this was just pure rubbish.

Honestly, I pretty much hated it. For starters, Shari is a selfish, spoiled and self-obsessed -- and the fact that she meets Kit when she has a boyfriend and doesn't waste any time sleeping with him immediately turned me off this story. Going on a journey that spans more than three hundred pages with a character you don't like isn't exactly a good time. Still, I pushed myself to finish -- even though it felt like ripping my teeth out at points.

The plot is just . . . thin. And meandering. Everything relies upon chance and a complete suspension of belief at points -- like the fact that Kit and Shari are suddenly in a serious relationship after knowing each other for a matter of days. Um, what? And while I did enjoy the very brief tour of London and surrounding areas in the latter half of the book, I spent most of the novel confused and overwhelmed. I mean, she's traveling the world with this guy? And there's some weird subplot with a childhood friend, and then we sprint ahead a year in time out of nowhere at the end of the book and Shari's aunt has a pet skunk and there's some strange medicine swap snafu and Kit becomes some secretive, weird guy and then they meet Ringo Starr and . . .

I know, slow down. That's how I felt, too.

As much as it disappoints me to say, I'd pass on this one. There are plenty of other British (and women's fiction) books in the literary sea to waste your time on The Anglophile.

Shari Diamond has two main goals for herself: finishing her dissertation on the lost language Volapuk, and fulfilling her needs of all things English- including the men. Does it matter that she is living in the East Village of New York and dating a nice Jewish boy that makes her own Jewish family extremely happy? It just isn't enough for Shari, but on a conference to Chicago, everything changes. Shari quickly falls for (and cheats on her nice Jewish boyfriend) with the handsome, albeit not-so gorgeous, Englishman Kit Brown.
Shari is shocked to discover the next day that Kit is actually a speaker at the conference- he is also studying Volapuk- and has found the last living speaker of the language that Shari has been searching for years to find. She is watching her dissertation go downhill with each convincing word Kit is speaking. What should her next move be? Why not invite Kit back to New York, meet her whole family, then travel across the Pond with him and finally see England for the first time.
The Anglophile by Laurie Gwen Shapiro is not the best. It took me until Chapter 5 to figure out what exactly the book was about and where the plot was headed. It failed to keep my attention until the last few chapters, but then it went right back to confusing with strange love twists. The whole story line was not engaging and with characters just popping in and out of Shari's life made it even more difficult to understand what exactly was happening. I hate to say a book is a waste of time, but this is nothing that I would recommend to readers.

If you are an anglophile - pass. on. this. book. It's not worth your time. Very little about England, just a very brief visit to London and not much at all of interest there. If you like romance novels that, for the most part, make little or no sense and depend upon your filling in the blanks as to why the protagonists actually like each other, much less love(?) each other, then read on, MacDuff.

I'm not quite sure why I finished this book. I've got lots of other books to read both in my house and on my kindle.

I'm a bit of an Anglophile. For as long as I can remember, I've loved England, its history, culture and of course, the cute boys with their British accents. Obviously, when I saw this book, I snapped it up in relative excitement.

That said, it was a bit of a disappointment to me. I had trouble getting past the first fifty pages and it really didn't hold my interest, so I struggled to get to the end of it. Though the premise was interesting at first glance, I found that I didn't like any of the characters in particular and that the love story that I'd been hoping for was basically non-existent.

One of the parts that I did end up enjoying was the bit about Abbey Road, and only because it had to do with the Beatles and London itself. I have a soft spot for touristy stuff like that, and so that particular part of the book definitely appealed to me.

And, at the very least, I was happy with how the book finally came to an end.