The Actor and the Housewife

**may contain spoilers**

About 100 pages in, I groaned. I wondered if we would get past the cliche green jello and sherbet punch. And I just didn't see how a top Hollywood heartthrob actor would ever in a million years just call up a housewife to talk about nothing. It just doesn't happen. But I don't like to not finish books. Someday I will return to Gone With the Wind just to say I finally finished it. So I pushed through hoping it would get better, and then suddenly I was sucked in. I finished the last third just last night. Let's just say that the end was much better than the beginning. There were funny parts. There were cute parts. And there were a few parts that were somewhat believable. I admit that I cried a lot during the third quarter and I liked that the last quarter didn't dissolve into a sappy romance but that reality checked back in. Except for the helicopter in suburban Salt Lake.

I totally agree with my friend that, while I love Shannon Hale's young adult fiction dearly, she must be trying to live out her fantasies with Austenland and The Actor and the Housewife.

So I finished it. But I didn't love it.