A False Sense of Well Being (Ballantine Reader's Circle)

Rating:
Summary: DISCOVER this great new writer!
Review: Amazon customers & fiction lovers everywhere: Begin reading this book and, trust me, you won't be able to put it down! It's a GREAT read, and those "gushing" reviews from other notable authors on the cover are all true & right to the point, in my humble opinion. It's a story that shows its characters flaws and really gets the reader into their hearts. Sure, the story meanders at times, and Jessie is obsessed with her own problems (tell me someone who isn't at times because life's problems can be overwhelming -- just watch any talk show on tv and you'll see more whining there than anywhere in this novel), but if you've gone through a midlife crisis (I sure did), you'll relate to Jessie's worries about her "perfect" life and "perfect" good husband, and whether that's really what she wants out of life. In the end, you'll grow to love Jessie and her imperfect self that aches to be perfect again. I enjoyed this novel from page one till the end.

Rating:
Summary: Wonderful
Review: I finished this book in one evening. It flows. The characters are developed and tied together wonderfully. Enough characters to add flavor and show the main character, Jessie, in a mix of relationships, not too many characters to muck it up. It has the mix of humor, sadness, intrigue etc., to keep a reader interested. I DO NOT know how the reader/reviewer from Seattle who doesn't know who Calvin Thacker is missed his introduction in the same chapter. AHEM.... REGARDLESS... The story is about Jessie Maddox who married years previous for the same reasons she's miserable now... she married for stability, comfort... now her life is mundane and predictable and she thinks the False Sense of Well Being warned about on prescription bottles of her clients isn't such a bad thing to deal with. From the first line: I was married 11 years before I started imagining how different life could be if my husband were dead. How can you not read on? I loved this book and recommend it highly. The advice she gets from her family, from one of her patients, even the advice that the reader doesn't realize she's getting is priceless... The grass is always greener and you always want what you don't have.

Rating:
Summary: Thoroughly Disappointed
Review: I had a very difficult time getting into this book. The characters were shallow, the plot undeveloped, and overall a complete waste of time. I would expect "searching for self" books to be a little more deep and rich than this poor read.

Rating:
Summary: Thoroughly Disappointed
Review: I had real trouble with this book, unable to commit to any of it until way past the middle of it. I kept saying to myself that I was wasting time reading about these thoroughly uninteresting people and their boring lives, but I'm stuck with a broken leg with plenty of time to waste, so I persisted and it got a lot better later on, after Jessie goes back to her home and family in the deep South. I kept admiring the author's wonderful writing gift, but wishing she'd apply it to a more interesting story and plot, until I discovered that all her characters lead totally uninteresting, pitiful lives, and that's what she's writing about, at length and ad nauseatum, through Jessie's eyes! The heroine, despite all her efforts to escape her misery, is a prisoner like all the others, a victim who tries unsuccessfully to wake up from a false sense of wellbeing.

Rating:
Summary: Not Enough For Me
Review: I like this genre of book- middle-age woman suddenly finding herself lost in life & begins exploration. I just couldn't help but have a difficult time in finding a lot of originality within the pages.
I wanted it funnier & there are parts I think could've been, but simply fizzled. I found it particularly amusing when our heroine went back home for a visit & had to share the same roof with her sister's many exotic, talking birds.
Not much stood out in this book. It was okay, but I was expecting at least a bit more boundary-pushing going on. Not just a home visit spent looking back on first loves then finally figuring out that your present home w/ hubby is not so bad.

Rating:
Summary: A Little Odd for Someone in Their 20s
Review: I purchased this book in the bargain section of my local bookstore. I thought it sounded interesting after reading the synopsis. Unfortunately, the character is 38-years old and seems to be going through a midlife crisis. I'm only 22 and I found it very hard to relate to her in any way, form, or fashion. I'm not saying it wouldn't be an enjoyable read for someone else...just not for someone my age.

Rating:
Summary: A stunning fiction debut!
Review: I was lucky enough to read an advance copy of this new novel and it's absolutely WONDERFUL! The characters are funny and smart, and Jessie Maddox's desperate search for "well being" in her life takes some poignant and hilarious turns. Since that first experience with this story, I took the novel with me on a weekend trip to visit my parents and read it again, and enjoyed it all the more, learning even more about these complex and well drawn characters.

Three cheers for this new voice in Southern fiction! I'm an aspiring writer myself, and so the blurbs by the novelists Kaye Gibbons, Lee Smith, Anne Siddons, Terry Kay and Mary Hood (and others) caught my attention immediately and told me this was going to be a great read -- and the book did not disappoint. This one's going to be a bestseller, I just know it. Now I can't wait for a sequel of some kind -- because I want to know where Jessie goes from here. But whatever this new writer turns out in the future, I'll be watching and waiting!

Rating:
Summary: compelling view of woman's struggle with sterile marriage
Review: Perhaps all one needs to know about the beauty and quiet brilliance of Jeanne Braselton's debut novel, "A False Sense of Well Being, is that Kaye Gibbons, a national treasure herself, joined Braselton unannounced and unsolicited during the author's inaugural promotional tour. If Gibbons' resounding praise, that "this may be the best first novel" she has ever read is not convincing enough, perhaps the following will assist prospective readers to immediately purchase this compelling work.

Jessie Maddox, university educated and seemingly blessed with an industrious if not imaginative husband, has a serious problem. Her marriage is unfulfilling, so sterile in fact, that she longs even for a false sense of well being to sustain her through her unhappy days. Nursing a fantasy of her husband's death, Jessie suffers what many of us will recognize as truth: good people can discover themselves in marriages which are dessicated emotional wildernesses, where passions have died, only to be replaced to repetitive routines which mask the terrors of personal loneliness and unrequited yearnings for excitement, happiness and completion.

Jeanne Braselton's brilliance is her capacity to mold such serious subject material into a quiet, generous and sensitive novel, one which possesses not only insights into the marital experience, but wry humor, quixotic characters and an ironic view of women's rebellion against loveless relationships. For any couple who "spend their days moving around within the institution of marriage like the planets orbiting the sun," Braselton's novel will read with the ring of truth. When Jessie laments that her relationship with her husband has shrunk to the level of friendship and even that "was strained more often than not," she speaks for any person whose prospects for happiness have shriveled. Jessie sees her life "stretched out ahead -- solitary, unchanging, and passionless," and that prospect terrifies her.

Jessie hopes to find an answer to this intimately perplexing answer; the delight of the novel is the wacked-out characters from whom she tries to take solace and glean information. Her sister Ellen, trapped in blue-collar hell, is a rebel who flaunts her sexuality to the chagrin of her perpetually forgiving mother and patient father. Jessie's next door neighbor, Donna, solves her marital woes by satisfying her wants with a co-worker. Donna's illicit affair appeals and repels Jessie. By far the most satisfying secondary character is Wanda McNabb, who transcends the boundaries of patient-caseworker relationship when Jessie probes the actual reasons behind Wanda's murder of her husband after many years of marriage.

This amazing novel does not demonize men, does not pontificate about what is required for marriage to work, does not degrade its characters by requiring them to engage in predictable or stereotypical behaviors. Instead, "A False Sense of Well Being" permits its readers to discover their own possibilities and responsibilities to create dynamic, loving relationships in marriage. It takes real courage and true love of the human condition to write such a novel. Jeanne Braselton has done just that.

Rating:
Summary: Well Written and Aptly Titled
Review: This is a book for southern women who miss the south, and for those of us not from the south, but who moved there and were embraced by southern women. This book is an exclamation of our lives. We have a number of people to wonder about...the families we were born into and the ones we married into; the family member that we didn't choose, but have to live with; the friends that have brought us to a new understanding of family.

Braselton's book is well written and aptly titled.

Rating:
Summary: Underdeveloped characters,
Review: This is supposed to be a mid-life crisis book. Forget it. It's wrapped up too neatly at the end. So now Jessie thinks her husband Turner is a good guy. How did that happen? A couple of funny situations, a few poignant observations, but, otherwise a disappointing read.