Books that are comprised of letters can either go really great or fail. I was not a fan of the way that this was written. The letters were super long! Roxy was funny though and her character is definitely the highlight, but everything else didn't do it for me.

Thank you to the publisher and Netgalley for an E-ARC in exchange for my honest review.

AVAILABLE APRIL 7th

Uh...this was no Bridget Jones's Diary.

Yes, both Bridget and Roxy are quirky, but where Bridget was quick, precise, and hilarious...Roxy is long, rambling, and sometimes mildly amusing. Roxy enjoys writing letters to her ex-boyfriend, who, for a short portion of the story, is also living in her guest bedroom. In those letters, she writes about her veganism; her lack of action between the sheets; her merman vibrator; her tweaker meth-head neighbors; her hatred of big corporations (including Lululemon); her deli job at Whole Foods; her "furballs," (a miniature Dachshund named Roscoe and a cat named Charlize Theron); her experience with a sex cult (which was cringe-worthy); her boss, Dirty Steve; her love for Patrick, the beer guy at Whole Foods; and her inability, as an artist, to paint.

Unfortunately, the letters are so long, the chapters are never-ending. By the time I was nearly 40% through the book, I'd only gotten through four chapters.

Roxy is a fun character, but the sole utilization of letters to tell her story simply didn't work.

It's a cutesy story and would probably be perfect as a light, easy beach read...but if you're expecting another Bridget Jones, you'll be disappointed.

2.5 stars

Many thanks to the publisher for my review copy.

Thank you to Simon & Schuster and #netgalley for the advanced copy for my honest review. This book comes out April 7, 2020!

Tiny Synopsis: Think Bridget Jones if she lived in Austin, Texas behind a deli counter at Whole Foods hating the corporate overloads that have taken over her favorite hot spots in town. Her ex bf Everett has moved into her spare room so she pens letters to him when he pays rents late, roommate annoyances, and other hilarious life situations.

My Review:⭐️⭐.5/ 5 stars
So the the style of writing took a while to get used to and I started to think it was very endearing to read in this format. However, about ¼ of the way in, I realised very quickly that I did not like Roxy. She complains… a lot! She makes the worst dating mistakes and completely insecure with herself - which explains why her friends are all a bit at arms length. You think about why she and Everett even broke up in the first place and you immediately see it’s her - she is the issue. Despite being judgemental about those who wear Lululemon and shop at Whole Foods, she herself fits into her own stereotype. The more I read about her life, the more I loathed her. Maybe biased because I do wear Lululemon and shop at whole foods.. :)

I had heard such great things about this book, and after seeing comparisons to “Where’d you go Bernadette”, my expectations were high! Sadly, I was a little disappointed. This book is compiled of letters by Roxy to her ex-boyfriend about her life. She basically treats the letters as her journal. I love reading books from the point of view of eccentric characters, however, Roxy wasn’t as much eccentric as she was immature which got a little annoying. I had to keep plugging along in the middle, but I did really enjoy the ending that had chick flick vibes, so I’m glad I pushed through!

Thanks to NetGalley, the publisher and the author for an advanced copy of this book in return for an honest review.

Thank you Netgalley and Simon & Schuster for my arc of The Roxy Letters by Mary Pauline Lowry

Description:
Roxy is a vegan, pet owner and highly artistic person who experience a few turns in life that leads her to heartache and all other things and decided to tell her stories by writing letters to her ex boyfriend Everett.

I give this book ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ because it’s so funny, naughty and totally relatable. The book defines different kind of relationships and not just the romantic ones. Each person have to go through some down times in their life and feels like they might never get out of it but unexpected things happens and choices will be made. The novel shows what everyone needs to know, there’s always a rainbow after the rain even if it have to be hilarious in between lol. Fantastic job Mary Pauline! This novel is beyond marvelous!

Everything you need to know about Roxy is in the first annoying as hell letter she wrote to her new roommate. She is selfish and ridiculous and you just hate her immediately. Will she be redeemed? Will she grow and learn? Not really. She is just one of those self-centered, entitled brats that we are all so sick of. Do we care what happens to her? Not really. And I tried. Oh, yes, I tried. I did not succeed.

This book is hilarious, lighthearted, heartwarming and cute! Roxy is underemployed, sexually frustrated and overall just needing a change! This book reminded me of The Bridget Jones’s Diary and Where’d You Go Bernadette. I loved it! It made me laugh out loud and was such a great break from my usual thrillers. The format it is written which is short letters makes it a quick and easy read too!

This is an eclectic collection of characters. Roxy is living a strange life. The author uses her letters to her ex-boyfriend/roommate to tell the story of her day to day life. It is filled with mishaps at work, at home, in her personal life and her attempts at dating. She goes on a crusade to not only change her life but that of Everett’s.

This was a fun and quirky read. I liked that the book was in the format of letters from Roxy to her ex-boyfriend Everett while Roxy learns what it means to "adult" in Austin. There were parts that had me squirming while other parts had me laughing. I enjoyed Roxy's evolution.

This was a DNF for me. I’m not a fan of books written in letters. I tried to get into it but I just couldn’t.

Thanks to Netgalley for my advanced ebook copy.

This book is so fun! So I am a huge fan of Bridget Jones and the fact that this one is similar is what drew me to it. It's not ~quite as much fun as Bridget Jones but that's not to say that I didn't enjoy this one a ton!

This is a really fun, quirky book that definitely ends up getting unexpectedly deep in some places. But overall, it's a really nice romantic comedy with some wonderful, hilarious characters. It's well written (I love the letters format!) and a really easy book to just fly through. (Which is especially great for our current times when concentration is hard to come by.)

I honestly can't sing praises for this book enough. Roxy is a really fun character, as are so many of the others in her life. I also really enjoyed Austin as a backdrop. It's a city I've ~heard about but don't really know much about. So I loved seeing it through this lens.

Overall, this is a really wonderful book if you're looking for something quick and fun to help take your mind off things. I definitely recommend this one! It was a really fun time and I'm so glad to have read it. I can't rave about it enough!!

Thanks to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for allowing me to read this book in exchange for a review. It was a pleasure!

The Roxy Letters is a lighthearted book, told in the form of letters from Roxy to her ex-boyfriend Everett. Roxy is going through a rough-path: dead-end job, no love life to speak of, and buried in debt because her wiener dog loves eating her underwear. All she wants is to be loved and be an artist, not too much to ask? What follows is a weird little romp with a cast of super strange characters, who are all more charming and likeable than Roxy herself.

Roxy's POV was a bit hard to relate to at times. She funny, but oh goodness is she annoying too. Roxy and I would probably not be friends, and honestly I'd be ok with that. Her adventures, for lack of a better word, are just as crazy as she is and equally unbelievable. I also don't think I've ever read a book with so much talk about female masturbation. Not a bad thing, just not my cup of tea. The secondary characters, like Annie and Artemis, save the book for me. I think they were both so good for Roxy in their own ways, especially when it came to calling her out on her B.S.

SPOILER: I DID NOT like the plot twist of Artemis being bipolar. I did not like the way that it characterized a person struggling with being bipolar and I think that Roxy could have explored that a bit more with her friend. Yes, she visits her in the mental hospital, but it never felt more than a way to reckon with Artemis and what she means to Roxy.

Overall, The Roxy Letters is a fun, quirky book that definitely has an audience. It was not my favorite read of the year, but certainly an enjoyable one.

TW: suicide attempt (alluded to); alcoholism and drug abuse; characters struggling with sobriety.

At the heart of this story told in letters, from Roxy to her ex-boyfriend, is Roxy trying to reclaim herself after a huge betrayal. Unfortunately, at least for me, Roxy is a very annoying person who prays and worships planetary deities, calls her pubic hair area her "power triangle," and spells girls "grrrls." She is pretty much the caricature of why most people slam millennials. Oh, and why do we know what she calls her pubic hair area? Because Roxy is obsessed with masturbation. I truly mean obsessed! The only reason this book got 3 stars was towards the end the story actually got good and veered away from talking about Roxy and her self-stimulation.

This book is light-hearted and fun. At first I had trouble getting into the narrator's voice but as the book went on it got more and more natural. Roxy is an eccentric, sometimes-Vegan, animal lover working in Whole Foods in Austin, TX. She has trouble with love but when she meets a new friend, Artemis, she is encouraged to finally pursue her crush and do something with her life. What could go wrong? I was annoyed by Roxy for the first 20-ish percent of the book, but she did grow on me as the story went on. I think this is a fun light read for millennials especially.

I loved this book so much more than I probably should have. The main draw on this for me, this is quintessentially Austin, Tx, which happens to be where I live. The author has captured our city perfectly in this epistolary novel.

Meet Roxy who is a twenty-something artist, vegan, working at Whole Foods in the deli. She loves her fur balls and her ex-boyfriend has moved into her second bedroom in her house. Roxy has just found out they are going to open Lululemon on one of the most famous streets in Austin, home of BookPeople, Whole Foods and Waterloo Records. She will do anything to make sure this does not happen.

Roxy is a good hearted person, who basically gets everything wrong. She is totally endearing, and her core group of friends are actually amazing even though they suffer from all the same idiosyncrasies that Roxy has.

I just loved this book so much. Following her life over several months in daily letters to ex, Roxy will endear herself to you. You will laugh, cry and feel just about every other emotion that she has. We could all do a little more to be like Roxy.

Thank you NetGally and Simon & Schuster for an Advanced Reader’s Copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I wanted to like this but some hundred pages in an dI just couldn't get into it. While it is well-written, the fact that it was just written as one-sided letters was confusing to me and hard to follow along and keep up. Roxy wasn't the easiest character to invest in and it's been hard to motivate myself to stick with this book. So, unfortunately, all I have to say is meh, it's okay. While I so badly wanted to read this based solely on the description, I had to DNF it: it just wasn't the book for me.

Reading this book, I couldn’t tell if I was supposed to take Roxy seriously or not. The main character and narrator had good intentions but was just such a caricature that I couldn’t bring myself to care too much about her or root for her. There were a few lines that I absolutely loved for how they summed up female relationships—such as the statement that “disclosing harrowing secrets about past relationships is a critical ways girls bond.” It was so perfect that I sent it along to a couple of girlfriends. Overall, it was enjoyable but not the most riveting book.

In this anxious time of social distancing and self-quarantine…

Do you need a book to make you laugh out loud?

Do you need a story that will make you smile at someone’s goofy but absolutely legit antics?

Do you need to read about someone who has been kicked rather a lot by life but picks herself up and carries on through it all with an absolutely infectious (in a good way, not a COVID-19 sort of way) attitude?


If you answered yes to any of these questions, I highly suggest you acquire a copy of THE ROXY LETTERS as soon as humanly possible.

I did not know I need this book in my life, but I did. And I’m keeping it to re-read later because I just know that Roxy will make me laugh and feel a little bit lighter all over again.

THE ROXY LETTERS is, in fact, an entire novel of letters written by Roxy to her ex, Everett. There is no record of what Everett might have thought of the letters, and Roxy doesn’t even give them all to him, but there is something inherently compelling about the way she is able to say everything to him.

I think a book about Roxy’s trials and tribulations written in a more standard format, whether first or third person, would not have been nearly as personal and interesting. I mean… in her letters, she talks about her ‘period underwear’ drawer and I can’t see that sort of thing working very well in a third-person narrative.

Roxy is not perfect, and she knows it. She’s hard on herself but she uses the letters as a way to be hard on herself before she talks herself out of the impending funk with wit, humor, and even grace.

Maybe that’s part of the reason this book is so damn good… because she uses writing and letters as therapy, in a way, and I do that too. And since Mary Pauline Lowry wrote the book the way she did, I got to read it as therapy and feel better for it.

So I offer my sincerest thanks to Mary Pauline Lowry for writing this fantastic, funny, free-spirited book.

Now go get yourselves a copy!

Roxy is 28 and her life is sort of a mess so she starts to write letters to Everett, her ex boyfriend and now room mate that he will never read. Some might quibble about what and how she writes but think of this as all the things she wants to say to him at first and then to herself. She's not nice to the customers at Whole Foods where she works, she's angry about how the city of Austin has changed, and she's really frustrated with herself. SHe's got some fun friends, a couple of pets, and a smart mouth (or really, pen). You might find her deeply annoying at first (I did) but stick with this and read her evolution. I found myself rotting for her by the end. Thanks to the publisher for the ARC. An entertaining fast read which just might cheer you up.

The Roxy Letters by Mary Pauline Lowry was the perfect read for this crazy world we are living in. Roxy is an animal loving, starving artist who can’t seem to get ahead. This novel is written as a series of letters to her ex-boyfriend as Roxy tries to carve out her way in the world.
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This book is light and fun. Roxy is quirky and entertaining. The entire cast of characters is unique - a meth addict, a bipolar friend with many alter egos, etc. This book gives me major Bridget Jones vibes. I also really enjoyed the Austin, TX setting. I recently visited Austin for the first time and spent some time in BookPeople, while my husband was perusing Waterloo Records. I love when I am able to identify a specific setting like that and in this case it was mostly set at that one intersection.