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Audiobook: solid narration
An entertaining character-driven novel featuring a 45-year-old woman trying to reconcile with her estranged daughter. This book is getting lots of hype and I loved the premise. Grace won't be for everyone but she's going to be a memorable MC for me this year. Good on audio and recommended for fans of Eleanor Oliphant is completely fine

This one reminded me of Where’d You Go, Bernadette and Eleanor Oliphant and honestly I am getting a little tired of this character being portrayed by women, especially working moms. I wanted to enjoy this one way more than I did but it fell short for me. I was wanting more and less at the same time.

Thank you to NetGalley and Macmillan Audio for this copy in exchange for an honest review.

3.5⭐️ Amazing Grace Adams is a fast paced story of two strangers that meet through a common interest. Grace Adams has experienced trauma and is now in a state of numbness, from the loss and pain she has been dealt. Her character was messy and flawed, but relatable too.

🎧 I loved reading in the immersive style of the physical book with the audiobook. The narration by Claire Skinner was so good, and really brought Grace to life.

*many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the gifted copy for review

Narration was solid.

The story was all over the place! There was too much going on and three different time lines to follow. While I was able to keep the time lines straight, I found myself not really caring and just thinking...let's get on with it. Give me the big "reason" she lost her sh*t and I can end this.

Hormones.

Our protagonist, Grace has a lot to answer for here. Or her hormones do. Once a popular television personality, now doors slamming shut. Husband filing for divorce. Job gone. Daughter out of control. Hot flashes. Crying jags.

What now?

Do I really want to read anything more?

Who wants to relive perimenopause?

Is this modern womanhood? Is this how far we have come? Do I need to be reminded of what it was like to parent my teen boys? Oy!

Seriously. It really is hard to root for Grace. Let alone my old me, if I am to be honest. She is not only flipping off the world, but representing the darkest self-hating thoughts of a certain demographic…

And…

I remember that time. Not pretty! And…

Not fair. Very, very stressful.

How do you separate your hormones from your true self?

There is something to be said about the cover of this book and that finger, wouldn’t you say? Got to love it!

I have mixed feelings about Grace.

On one hand, being perimenopausal myself, I connected with a lot of the physical, mental, and emotional things she’s going through, but think the blurb writer set me up for disappointment.

I loved Ove and Eleanor.

Grace was…fine.

There was lots to appreciate about this book:
-the tackling of tough topics
-the snappy dialogue
-the hopeful, but not saccharine ending.

I didn’t love the disjointedness of the three timelines.

All in all, I’ll be on the lookout for more from this author.

Thanks to NetGalley and Macmillan Audio for this poignant ARC.

DNF @ 27%. I foune "Amazing Grace Adams" to be too all over the place for my liking. The lack of focus is driving me a bit nuts. I had trouble focusing on the timeline jumps and story as a whole as it skips over decades of time repeatedly and without warning. It is very, very messy. I appreciate Grace as a main character thus far, but her actions are frequently annoying and grating. I am also having trouble identifying with her and the other characters in the story. Claire Skinner is a wonderful narrator, but I am not digging this, so unfortunately, I am DNFing.

Thank you to NetGalley, Macmillan Audio, and Fran Littlewood for the complimentary ARC of this book. All opinions are my own. I was not compensated for my review.

The back and forth of this book was rough. It was hard to keep up. My favorite part of audiobooks is that my brain (me personally) can focus on the book and other tasks. But this book left me frustrated because there was so much back and forth I coul keep up

This one packed a kick. <i>Amazing Grace Adams<i/> somehow put into words how it feels to be a middle-aged mom, especially the road to how she got there. Because no one knows how you can go from a carefree woman in her 20s to all of a sudden a mom in her 40s who is about to crack. How?
How can one single person survive at their absolute worst breaking point, and then still keep surviving?
This book does not hold back. Not even for a second. There is mention of menopause, suprise pregnancy, coping with teens, loss of a child, loss of a marriage, grooming of a minor, social media bullying. Poor Grace, may be amazing, but she is broken. And she is leaving a trail of her disaster all over town - quite literally - just to deliver a birthday cake to her 16 year old.
For any mom out there who thinks that they are going to lose it any minute, Grace Adams might have you beat.

I really wanted to love this book because on the whole I love a story of a messy, unhinged, misunderstood woman but this felt a little forced. The choices felt over the top and stereotypical in an over the top way that mad it hard to connect with really any of the characters until I was far into the story. I think this story would work for some audiences but for me it felt a little over done.

The narration was well done and enjoyable.

Thank you to NetGalley for the early release copy of Amazing Grace Adams by Fran Littlewood.
This is a fast paced and exiting read and it's definitely relatable. The book kept my attention and I listened in one day. The reader did a great job and I enjoyed the performance of the book.
I look forward to exploring other books by this author. It definitely made me laugh several times!

Tightly written story that takes place over the course of one very terrible day for the main character with flashbacks to fill in the story. Very enjoyable in the audiobook form, and would also make a great movie.

ARC via publisher via Goodreads, but the opinion is my own.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the audio arc! A Read With Jenna pick for good reason, just from the cover I knew that Amazing Grace Adams would be quirky and empowering. This was so interesting and I found myself very into the story. A quick listen that I throughly enjoyed!

Amazing Grace Adams is a story about two strangers who meet through a unique common interest and a strong physical attraction to each other. Untraditionally they start a family, marry and in short time due to circumstances they cannot control they fall apart. The story begins with beautiful innocence and continues onward with spontaneity, impulsivity, romance, faith, joy, stress, grief, turmoil, love, empathy, forgiveness, compassion. Told through constant chunks of time in flashbacks fluctuating from the beginning of their relationship straight through the next 17 years. The protagonist had childhood trauma that snuck up on her during the most difficult times and alongside a tragedy that plays out without reveal for half of the book, keeping the reader bewildered and engaged.
Graces life experiences have caused her mental health to suffer and boil up through the years and finally spills over into her present life destroying her relationships with both her husband Ben and daughter Lottie. I was sad to see a strong female character self destruct and drive away people who loved her. Although I wanted things to work out in the end I know this would have been a predictable scenario and as a reader, I may have gotten bored. I truly felt disappointment in Grace for not fighting harder for her marriage and family and also felt compensated by some comfort seeing Grace show resilience after hitting her final rock bottom and take ownership of her poor qualities and dire mistakes, by putting her daughter first on her priorities. I leave the book wondering what will become of Grace when she is freed in the future and I am pulling for her and Ben to find their way back to each other. As theirs was a love worth fighting for. I enjoyed the story and loved the narrator.

Grace Adams is not having a good day. She started it off stuck in traffic, and ended it… much worse. But between the beginning and end of the day we are filled in on not only every step of her day, but also every salient detail of her life that led to the particular situation she currently finds herself in. I will give Grace one thing: She does know how to fall apart in spectacular fashion. Really. She does us all proud.

But I digress. After meeting Grace, we learn why she’s trying to get to her daughter’s birthday party, but not at her own house. We learn what happened to her marriage. We learn about her career trajectory (high highs to…nonexistent). We learn about her peri-menopause and the havoc it’s wreaking with her body and mind. There’s so much in this story, and so much for us to catch up on.

Suffice it to say, without spoilers, Grace has been through it. Pretty much in every area of her life, there’s been tragedy and hardship. It’s amazing she’s still standing, but somehow she is. Her story is one that evokes sympathy and you can’t help but feeling gutted as you learn some of the things she’s had to survive. The odd thing about this book, though, is that as much as her story is deeply emotional, I felt oddly removed from it. The story is sympathetic, and Grace should be too. Maybe it’s the grim detail she shares, or the extremity of the poor decisions she makes, or how she treats the people around her, but I just couldn’t get on her wavelength. There were weird disconnected details that were thrown in ostensibly to add a quirky angle, but they just felt misplaced. And the way she behaves towards the people in her life is… odd. I get she’s dealing with trauma and that can manifest in numbness, but as it was described I just didn’t feel that from her. Everyone in the story was a bit off kilter and didn’t quite coalesce into characters I could fully see come to life. They each seemed to have different aspects, as we all do, but they weren’t adequately explored or tied together, so the characters just felt like they weren’t quite put together right.

It’s hard to put into words exactly what didn’t work about this book for me, because it should have. I loved Grace’s middle fingers up attitude, and I loved her early adventures. But there were these whole other parts of her that just clashed. She’s falling apart, but there’s so much detail about how she’s falling apart that there’s no chance to really feel it – it’s all clinical description of her doing crazy stuff that seems cold and disconnected, which in turn makes Grace seem cold and disconnected.

It wasn’t a bad book. I’m glad I read it. I’m glad I got to know Grace. I like books that feature women who have been through motherhood and loss and pain and are – in whatever way – working to deal with it and move on. This book did have all of that. It will probably be a wonderful point of recognition for a lot of women who read it, and I think it’s so important to have books featuring people – women – who don’t have it all together and who are allowed to be messy. The story did draw me through it, and I did want to find out what happened at the end. I was glad I stuck with it, and I could see how close this book was to being one I could feel myself in. So, so close!

Grace is barely hanging on. She is dealing with so much and every day is a struggle when all she wants is to repair her relationship with her daughter and find some peace in her head and heart. None of this can happen until she forgives herself and that is quite a tall order. There are multiple time lines, stories and experiences that brought her to where she and eventually to a better place. It was an emotional story that deals with some truly difficult difficult and tragic matters. At times it felt a bit disjointed and slow, but was overall a well written story about moving forward and forgiveness.

AMAZING GRACE ADAMS by Fran Littlewood thrusts readers into Grace's midlife crisis. Life is in arrears, her marriage is over, and she is estranged from her sixteen-year-old daughter. Grace is determined to extend an olive branch by delivering an expensive designer cake to her daughter's birthday party, but nothing goes as planned and her every move is thwarted.

Throughout this tempestuous day, we get flashbacks to Grace falling in love, entering motherhood, and changing careers. There is regret, longing, and doubts, and we wonder where it all went wrong. At a breaking point, Grace just digs in more and more, no longer caring about how people might perceive her, as her one aim is to reach her daughter and mend bridges. The varied timeline is more effective than a straight-through narrative, as their stark contrast heightens interest: what was the breaking point? Can things be restored? Can Grace find herself again?

Claire Skinner, the audiobook narrator, convincingly portrays a woman in crisis, struggling to do right but admitting somewhere along the way she lost her path and wonders if things can be mended.

I was entertained at the extreme antics; even if they felt a little unbelievable at times, no doubt readers will cheer her on and be drawn to a character who does all that they might only imagine doing, while their filters or life keep them in check.

(I received a digital ALC from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for my honest review.)

I haven't read the books that this one is suggested as read alike, but I can say that I might not, while being the age of the MC, the right reader for this one. Seeing women hit their limits and be "set off" doesn't read as enjoyable in my eyes. I can see how the American cover will make hands grab it, and it's part of a book club, so grab it and read it so you can chat at work. I didn't care for the flash backs as it led to some confusion. Many will love this one, but it was a swing and a miss for me.
Thanks NetGalley for the free audiobook. All thoughts are my own.

Grace's marriage isn't what she thought. Her daughter, 16, is somewhat estranged from her. She dwells in her memories as they don't let her down like the present does.

It took me a bit to get into this one, but once I was in I was in. Grace isn't an easy person.
To be or to be with it seems. But throughout the book we witness her growth.

In some ways this book was uncomfortable to read and at times hectic. Good mental health rep and over all a good read.

Many thanks to NetGalley and MacMillan Audio for an ALC in exchange for my honest review.