Books & Audiobooks
Twenty-six year old Lucy Young’s life sucks. She’s stuck in a cramped flat with weird roommates, a leaky ceiling, and a job that barely pays her enough to eat. On top of that, one night one of her best friends, Zoya, tells her she’s leaving their shared flat because she’s moving somewhere better.
Lucy can’t take it anymore. She happens across a wishing vending machine and wishes her life away. She wishes to skip to the good part, to a life that she can enjoy without worrying all the time. When she wakes up the next morning, she’s forty-something with a handsome husband, two kids, a beautiful house, and a job that respects her and pays her well. But as Lucy tries to figure out how to be this older Lucy with more responsibilities but also more sadness under her belt, she realizes life is less about the destination and more about the journey.
After reading and loving Sophie Cousens’ previous novel, Is She Really Going Out With Him (you can read my blog about that one here), I equally loved and devoured The Good Part. Less romance and more women’s fiction, The Good Part is a delightful mix of13 Going on 30 and Remember Me by Sophie Kinsella. Equal parts hilarious and heartwarming, it’s fascinating to see Lucy navigate this new chapter of her life which feels somewhat familiar but also terrifying to her. Her son immediately clocks that something is different about her and no matter how much Lucy tries to lie her way into her own future, it becomes apparent to her family that something is amiss.
It’s easy to wish for a better future, Lucy realizes, but that future that looks like a perfect picture could have been formed by hardship and heartbreak. On the surface, her life seems perfect, but Lucy quickly figures out the path she must have taken to get there. Her relationship with her handsome husband is far from perfect, and her big girl job comes with challenges too.
As Lucy begins to unearth the hidden stories and secrets of her own life, time begins to run out, and she must make the choice whether to stay in this flawed future or return to the present, filled with difficulties, with a chance that this wonderful future may or may not be hers. After being stuck in a book slump for the past few months, I raced toward the end, wanting to know what Lucy would end up picking and how it would affect her entire future.
The Good Part will make you laugh and it will make you cry, but Lucy’s journey is a great reminder that no life is perfect, and trials and tribulations make the good parts all that much sweeter.