Average Girl Reads

The Day I Shot Cupid: Hello, My Name Is Jennifer Love Hewitt and I'm a Love-aholic by Jennifer Love Hewitt

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Genre: self-help, celebrity book
On my TBR list?: No


Summary, from Goodreads:

In The Day I Shot Cupid, Hewitt offers her hard-won wisdom and tells us how to embrace love with both feet on the ground. First, we have to shoot Cupid. We have to believe that happily-ever-after is hard work—it's not all flowers and symphonies and floating hearts.

Wise and wry and refreshingly honest, Hewitt talks about how to pick the right guy and how to know when to let the wrong ones go free, and she offers some surprising truths about the opposite sex.

This book caught my attention because I like Jennifer Love Hewitt and I thought it would be a lighthearted memoir. Apparently, 2011 is my year for not reading book descriptions because this is yet another book that is not what I expected. It also became clear pretty quickly that at 44 years old, I am much older than the target audience for this book.

The "chapters" are really little snippets with topics like the top ways to get over a man after a breakup or how miserable it is to be on a diet. If I was reading these chapters as blog posts, I would have enjoyed them more. I've read several books that started out as blogs but fell flat when transferred to paper. The Hewitt book came together as the result of a girls' night out, but it still feels the same. The "surprising truths about the opposite sex" would not be a revelation to anyone who has dated more than one guy or lived with a man for over 20 years, as I have. Still, I can see that a 21-year-old would benefit from knowing that a workout can be a great way to alleviate the post-breakup blues or that you need to stand up for yourself in a relationship.

Ultimately, I think The Day I Shot Cupid makes a great bathroom book. I had it sitting on the edge of the tub in my bathroom and after a couple days, I noticed that two bookmarks had been added to it. Apparently, ABM and M (who just turned 18) had both been reading bits of the book when they were in the bathroom. ABM isn't much of a reader; he liked the book because it was light and the chapters were short. M found the book much funnier than I did, probably because she is young enough to have read some of these jokes for the first time. So if you keep the practice of having magazines like Reader's Digest in your loo, then you might want to slip this book in with them.



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I let my daughter C1 get her first library card last week. Considering that she is 14, you may be wondering what took me so long! For the most part, ABM and I are laid-back parents who don't do a lot of hovering over our kids. I don't have much desire to be an authority figure, but the little I do have pops out in strange ways. Knowing when the kids are old enough for various types of responsibility has been a difficult part of parenting for me, and that extends to library books.

My eldest daughter M got a library card when she was 11 because of the advanced program she was in at school. She lost it before she ever got a chance to use it. After that, I wasn't in a rush to get the other kids their own cards. Our current system of having the kids tell me the books they want and me requesting them online has been working fine. Now, however, C1 has more opportunities to go to the local library branch without me and she wants to be able to check out her own books and do her homework on the library computers instead of competing for time with her siblings. She presented a good argument, so I caved :-). C1 was so excited to get her own card that you would think it was a driver's license. For me it feels like I've given her almost as much freedom as a driver's license would provide. It seems that I am rapidly approaching the day when my kids won't be taking my reading suggestions any longer.

CURRENTLY READING: Since my last post, I've started reading both Life: Keith Richards and Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother with little progress. I picked both of these books because they have been widely discussed recently, and I thought I would zip right through them. Apparently, being a hot topic of conversation doesn't make a book any easier for me to read. For the Amy Chua book, I think I may switch to the audio book version so I can finish it while making progress on my other goal for this year -- doing more needlework.