Thin Rich Bitches by Janet Eve Josselyn

Starting over in life can bring about feelings of excitement, redemption and hope. However, if you’re 40 years old, newly divorced because your husband of 11 years cheated on you and impregnated his 25 year old paralegal, then rebuilding your life takes on a much different tone. In “Thin Rich Bitches”, author Janet Eve Josselyn displays her writing talent as she manages to capture the difficulty of starting over with honest, humorous and relatable storytelling.

Pippin Snowe, single mother of 10 year old Zeke, is struggling to adjust to her new life. She is recently divorced and completely on her own after living what she believed to be a happy life as the housewife of an up and coming lawyer. Now with no job and limited funds, she makes the decision to move into Aunt Scotty’s old farmhouse, which she inherited as a package deal that includes a spitting llama, a “wall-eyed” dog, an overweight cat and three African pigmy goats. Fully furnished, but abandoned and in need of repair, the farmhouse and Pippin seemingly have a lot in common. It will take time for Pippin to realize that the deteriorating farmhouse with its inhabitants and her “spiraling downhill fast” life both still have great potential.

Unfortunately, keeping a positive outlook is a little more complicated after she relocates to the farmhouse near the wealthy suburbs of Dover, Massachusetts. In that community, a woman’s most important job is to be socially relevant and Pippin could not feel more out of place. Without a husband, money, a fabulous home or a tiny waistline, Pippin is a walking contradiction of the “acceptable” Dover woman.

Readers will have no doubt that underdog Pippin will endure, but as with all women’s fiction novels, it’s the journey itself that’s the story. Pippin’s witty, and at times snarky, attitude begins to change and soon she is able to move forward to embrace her new life with all of its wacky imperfections.

A story with such a lively narrative could not be complete without lively characters to match. Pippin’s cohorts include Myra, her roommate from college who always has the latest and heavily opinionated “411” on everyone; Oatsie, who never misses her “appointment” with the tennis pro, placates her overeating, disabled husband and keeps a flamboyant designer on staff; and Candelaria, a non-English speaking, Guatemalan housekeeper, that perpetually naps during her work day.

One thing to take note of is that “Thin Rich Bitches” is not a man-bashing book, nor, contrary to the title, is it a woman-bashing book. This is a book of self discovery, which includes the observation of how we as women see ourselves fitting into the great, gratifying, but admittedly twisted sisterhood. Of course, as Pippin discovers and many of us already know, sometimes finding the perfect fit means not fitting in perfectly at all.