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The Actor and the Housewife: A Novel by Shannon Hale


My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I gobbled this book up yesterday! I really just hunkered down about 80 pages in last night at 10pm to read a bit before bed and wound up with a box of Kleenex on my bathroom floor at 3:30 this morning turning the last page. I just had to know what would happen!! While the ending is bitter-sweet instead of completely swoon, sigh, ride off into the sunset-worthy, the plot of this book is irresistable. Becky Jack (I love her name!! She sounds like a Pirate Queen or an English, pick-pocketing orphan), Utah Mormon mother of three-with-one-on-the-way, meets Felix Callahan, [British!!] Hollywood Superstar Extraordinaire, and they have an immediate and surprising connection. The story follows the two of them over a decade or so, and their exploits in a friendship that neither of them can understand or deny. Sounds juicy, right?


I was guffawing (there really is no other word for the sounds I was making) throughout the whole thing. I also found myself sobbing for a good 15 minutes at one part. But mostly I just sighed quite a bit at this wonderful story about friendship and family. I love Shannon Hale's writing style, her wit, and her ability to make me forget (about 25 pages in) how ridiculous and unrealsistic her plotline is. Heck, not only did I forget, I threw myself into the whole fantasy. I took away from it a warm fuzzy feeling that there is nothing like a bosom friend -that's what Anne [of Green Gables fame] calls it. Hale tries metabuddy and liver as descriptors of it in this book, but whatever you call it, everyone needs one. I think I'll ask George Clooney to be mine.

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