The Thin Pink Line by Lauren Baratz-Logsted

I wanted to like this book. I really did. Unfortunately, I hated it. I don't mean I disliked it. I really and truly hated it.

Jane thinks that she is pregnant and after telling her boyfriend, she starts her period. Instead of telling him the truth, she decides to fake a pregnancy and soon discovers that the world loves a pregnant woman. She fakes being pregnant at work and worst of all with her own family. She manages to pull this stunt for a whole nine months.

Publisher's Weekly claims, "Jane doesn't start out as the most likable of characters, but she changes so much over the course of the novel, and is so charmingly audacious, that readers
will be rooting for her-and wondering what she'll do at the end of the nine months."

Bullshit. Jane ends up even more selfish and psychotic than she starts. The only way that she changes is that she admits that she is crazy. The only thing I do give her credit for is making the right decision regarding her new boyfriend Tolkien. At least she didn't drag him into her awful clusterf*ck of lies.

Baratz-Logsted even makes Jane suck at her job. No editor in her right mind would think that a novel about a woman who sleeps with 10 guys and wants to pick one to be the father to her child would be a bestseller. I'm far from a prude but does Baratz-Logsted have any concept of morals?

Even worse than the character of Jane is the unbelievable way this books ends. I've seen some improbable endings before but this one is by far the most ridiculous. It's like Baratz-Logsted didn't want poor Jane to face reality so she created an ending that gives Jane a get-out-of-jail-free card. The ending was so disappointing that I was in a bad mood for the rest of the day. I've never had a book make me that angry before!

This is truly the worst book I have ever read. But since I was actually able to finish it, I'll give it an extra star. I only wish I had jumped to the ending sooner because then I wouldn't have wasted so much of my time.



Why am I sharing a trailer of the movie Labor Pains? Because this is what Baratz-Logsted's book should have been like. The storylines are so similar that I wonder if the scriptwriter read The Thin Pink Line and thought of all the ways she could make the story better.