NetGalley Review: The Lifestyle by Taylor Hahn

 The Lifestyle by Taylor Hahn

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Rating:   ✩✩✩✩✩

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This book has been touted as a “modern-day Emma,” though I would have to add “mashed together with Netflix’s Sex Life” as a qualifier.  Using the classic tropes of “failing marriage,” “one(s) that got away” and “swinging will save this relationship”, the story of Georgina’s love life unravels, often unwittingly at her own hands.  Hahn does a great job of filtering the entire narrative through Georgina’s eyes, making it clear from the first page that we have a chronically unreliable narrator on our hands.  The issues surrounding relationships, friendships, swinging and falling out of love are all handled as deftly and honestly as possible through this lens. The fact that as a reader, you maybe don't really even like Georgina serves as a feature, not a bug.  Despite the quality writing, this book still only gets three-stars from me because it wasn't interesting to read.  The Emma/Sex Life blend skirts so close to the originals, that it doesn’t feel like a unique story.  You know how it will end a chapter in, then just have to watch the characters flail towards resolution for a couple hundred pages. For me, that isn’t enjoyable, though other readers may enjoy that convention. 

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Published by:Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group  Release Date: 07 June 2022  

Purchase at: Amazon