A hysterical dramedy about a woman unhinged and at a crossroad. “Julian’s debut takes an unabashed look at a failed marriage, divorce, and dating under the scrutiny of a less than supportive family.” —former San Francisco Chronicle columnist, Adair Lara.Here I am, on my knees in front of the Trevi Fountain, hoping like hell the legend is true. That the fountain gives you solace and love by a mere … love by a mere toss of a coin.
Why am I here, exactly? Let’s see…
It started with my parents telling me to get married. Of course, being the good Catholic girl I am, I did.
Needless to say, that marriage nosedived, and my parents weren’t exactly happy about it.
Newly ditched and shamefully disowned, I decided to follow the advice of Babs, a tart-of-a-mentor, who offered me a job in Colorado.
Her advice? Sex…and lots of it.
The temptation of freedom, to do whatever—whoever—I wanted was too damn strong for me to say no.
And that’s how it all started. The men, the sex, the journey…
The dating bender.
Because everybody deserves a do-over.
THE DATING BENDER is a hilarious satire about dysfunctional family relationships, women who love the wrong men, and one epic hunt for happiness.
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Samantha’s family is completely insane, strict, drunk, and hysterical all at the same time. After reading the beginning, it is quite clear why she was desperate to get married and start her life. Obviously, that was a terrible decision. She wanted a life, she didn’t want the man to build the life with. Well, there are a lot of reasons why the couple were not so happily ever after. Samantha is left in the perfect position to figure out what she wants.
She gets a new job and her boss is too much. Legit, too much. I love crazy characters but five minutes into meeting the main character, you find the boss in the bathroom banging some dude half her age.
The story started off a little slow but then eventually picked up and that was when the humor and romance really started to work for me. It was well written and if you love a good magazine or pop culture reference, it’s perfect for you.
I didn’t like this book. Who wants read about a woman that recognizes alcohol problems in her parents but then binge drinks to the point of throwing up? She did that repeatedly so I quit reading it.
Very easy read
This one flew like the wind from page one. I love a good laugh and this one kept them coming. At times this story plays like a sitcom with all the funny messes Samantha gets herself into, but other times, the heart strings were more than tugged. I so related with Samantha’s plight as she bumbled along, sprinting towards her happily ever after. Love isn’t always pretty, or patient or kind, but the lessons we learn along the way make it well worth the trip. This book was one part self-discovery another part high jinx. I never knew what to expect and I kept flipping the pages to find out. This is one crazy ride. I loved every single pitstop along the way!
Wow! Where do I begin, this book rocked my world in all the right ways. I could not put it down, I read it in one setting because I was just dying to see what would happen next. I loved how it flowed nicely, the dialogue was hysterical and the cast of characters a riot. From the moment the book opens with a shotgun wedding that goes horrible wrong, I knew I was in for a wild ride, and boy was I ever. I laughed, far too loud throughout the whole thing. I spit out my coffee involuntarily at times at some of the lines and scenes that were flying! And when I wasn’t laughing I was crying. Because Samantha is faced with a lot of conflict around the life she wants to be living, and the one her family has in mind for her. And talk about dysfunction, this family is a train wreck! This was one heck of an emotional roller coaster all right. I didn’t want to put it down. Samantha, the heroine, in this story is no saint, she is real, flawed and wildly entertaining. I love stories and characters that are relatable, that face real problems and don’t always have the right answers or say the right things. Let’s face it that’s real. Samantha is struggling in life, love, work and on the family front. She sucks us into her world that is full of crazy scenes, bad dates (and hot ones too!), even worse family feuds, and work drama, lots and lots of drama! I also love that she roams from one city to the next, as she tries to figure out what she wants and needs out of life. It’s fun to get a glimpse of big city life through her eyes. And the international turn that the book takes at the end had me pining for a European vacation! This is the first book I’ve read from Christina and I can’t wait to see what she cooks up next. This is a must read for sure.
In a word FUNNY! Fall off the chair spit out your coffee sort of funny. Samantha is a bit of a train-wreck, which is one of the most lovable things about her. She is hell-bent on happiness and goes-for-it with hilarious and at times heartbreaking results. She tears through men like toilet paper, kills it on the career front, and her family is a nightmare, but she charges forward in spite of and because of it all. If you want to be up all night reading, laughing and relating, this book hits all those high (and at times) low notes. This is my first book from this author and I can’t get enough of her, more please!
There was a lot to love about this book. Sharp, witty, deliciously dark and funny. From the opening scene at the wedding from hell, I knew I was in for a wild ride. Samantha is an every woman trying to live the life she was meant to live but she gets wildly lost along the way. Which is real. And the men! bad boys are her thing (mine too lol) lots of steamy stuff that is sexy in one beat and downright hilarious in the next. Life and love are complicated this book celebrates all of that. Super fast read!
Positively hilarious. A mash-up between Girls and Sex and the City. A great debut from Christina Julian. Looking forward to more from her.
This was a laugh until you cry until you laugh again kind of book. It took me to those places again and again and again. Samantha was all kinds of a hot mess but that made me love her all the more, as I related with her yo-yo love life and the struggles she had with a less than supportive family. This was a wild ride, emotionally and literally as Sam flies all over the globe in search of her HEA. I tore through this book because I just had to know what was going to happen next. If you are a lover of truly funny, roll off your seat romantic comedies, that also run deep emotionally, this one is for you!
This was a wild ride in the best possible way! I read this rollicking rom-com in one sitting. I laughed out loud in some places, cried in others, screamed at the the lead character Samantha for doing and saying some of the things she said and cheered her on to the bittersweet end. I related with and at times, I’ll admit it, I was annoyed with her for making some of the choices she made. But more than anything I was pulled along for the ride that invoked just about every emotion that’s out there. Whether your single, dating, married or over any and all, it relates on a lot of different levels. Comedic and dramatic in all the right places. Light fast read!
I love a good romantic comedy and I had high hopes for this one, but it fell flat for me. I didn’t find Samantha at all likable. She has loads of Catholic guilt, but that doesn’t prevent her from sleeping with someone else while she’s still married, or from sleeping with a married man. Cheating in fiction doesn’t offend me, it is fiction, after all, but the actions just don’t work with her guilt. Between the bed hopping, drinking, and inability to control her gag reflex, she’s also indecisive and seems to always be looking for something or someone better. The only person I had any empathy for in this story was Sheldon, Samantha’s hapless husband. I get that he was out of touch with the marriage, but he did at least explain himself. The author falls back on slapstick and repetition a lot more than I cared for and in my opinion, vomiting just isn’t funny past a certain age. There are also a lot of time jumps, making the story choppy. From reading the blurb, I felt like the story had great potential, but everything considered, it wasn’t for me and I don’t think I’ll be reading future books from this author.
You know how when you’re driving down the road and you see an accident off to the side and you tell yourself not to be one of those annoying rubberneckers and then you find yourself looking anyway as you drive past? That accident is this book for me. I knew I shouldn’t finish it but I’m no quitter and I just had to see if it could redeem itself. To put it nicely, it did not. This review is going to be rough and I’m going to try super hard to behave and be constructive with my criticism. But it will be difficult.
I was approached by someone to read this book … it wasn’t the author and I’m not entirely sure who she was … the author’s rep or a PR rep or something. Anyway, I was intrigued when I first read the blurb and I wanted to know more. But I’m going to be super honest right now and tell you I don’t know where in the blue bloody blazes this blurb has come from because it doesn’t even sound like the main character, Samantha, and part of it doesn’t go with the book. As I was getting this review together, I reread the blurb and what the hell … I had to double check that I had the right book info because it did not match up to the book … I mean seriously, W.T.F. Let’s go to the 3rd sentence in this blurb … it talks about the parents telling Samantha she needed to get married … um … in the book, it is made VERY clear in the VERY beginning that Samantha is getting married to ESCAPE her parents. That is really said quite a few times and I remember zero times that her parents were on her ass to get married. I could be wrong. Maybe her parents harped on her over and over but all I remember is the parents being uncaring douchecanoes and telling her they were going to disown her if she didn’t do exactly what they wanted.
So she goes from that super healthy relationship with her parents saying ugly things to her constantly and immediately jumps into a super healthy marriage with a dude that I don’t even think she knew well. Which would be fine, IF THAT WAS EXPLAINED. She seemed in love with him and totally sure about marrying him. Sheldon seemed like a nice dude and then he stops talking to her for months and treats her horribly? I mean come on. Unless the dude you’re marrying is a sociopath, they wouldn’t change THAT much after you get married. Yes, people change after they get comfortable in a relationship but to pull the stuff that this donkey, Sheldon, did? No. I doubt it. But then again, Samantha and Sheldon barely had a relationship at all. Not that you get the chance to find out that they didn’t have a relationship with the way this book’s timeline jumps around.
That’s another thing. A distinguishable timeline is absolutely non-existent with this book. The author skips days, weeks and even months. And then the reasoning for the jumps from the main character are as flimsy as her marriage. There needs to be a REASON to skip 6 months. Hell, there should be a reason to skip even a week. Readers don’t want stuff skipped over unless there is a payoff in the end from that skip. If the story is enriched by the skip, I’ll take that. I’ll even take it if the character slipped on her brother’s cousin’s dog’s uncle’s hat and she was in a coma for a month because she landed on a stack of Harry Potter books and knocked her head on a Monopoly box. I don’t care what the darn reason is, just give one the readers a reason that does justice to the storyline.
This is the last thing I’m going to say and then I’ll get off my soap box and the lovers of this book can take a moment to go grab their voodoo dolls and name them after me … this main character … Samantha … I’m 98% sure she has never had an original thought in her entire life. She quotes magazine articles and tv shows like they are the damn bible and she worships them at an alter in her garage. I don’t know if Samantha spouting off every five seconds what some nobody wrote on the pages of Cosmo or some other nonsense magazine is supposed to be endearing but it wasn’t. It was irritating. It made me want to light my Kindle on fire.
I don’t know why this book has enraged me so much. Maybe it’s because the time I invested in what I thought would be a good book … but this isn’t the first time … maybe it was the relationships or the lack of entertainment I found in the book. Who knows. It is probably a combination of things. I should ask someone at Cosmo why I didn’t like this book. Or write in to Dr. Oz. What am I thinking, Oprah probably knows … I bet she’d tell me why I didn’t like this book and why I prefer the outside of the TicTac to the inside.
* I received this novel in exchange for an honest review *