Reviews May Vary: Book Review (Blog Tour): Friday Night, Eight O'clock by Nino Gugunishvili

I received a copy of the ebook for free in exchange for a review and participation in the blog tour, going on right now!

What Goodreads had to say:

Tasha is a dreamer in search of a new dream.

She's bored with Pilates. She's never tried yoga. She doesn't even have a driver's license. She lives a pretty ordinary life as a freelance writer who battles the occasional flow of melancholy with the regular flow of martinis. Nestled into her couch, her television remote in one hand and a cold adult beverage in the other, she's found a favorite way to pass the hours on a Friday evening. It's comfortable and familiar, but it's not exactly an exciting way to live. With two of her closest friends, a bossy mother, an eighty-two-year-old grandmother, and Griffin, her fat yellow Labrador at her side, she knows that there has to be something better out there.

But where?

When she gets an unexpected offer to relocate to France to write a magazine column, she thinks her circumstances are improving. But life in a new country isn't all pêches et la crème. Now far away from her comfort zone, Tasha must find the inner strength to start a new career and navigate the bizarre and unknown world of professional jealousy, intrigue, and conflicting personalities in a very foreign land.

It's enough to make a girl yearn for those quiet nights on the couch.

My two cents:

The story was interesting and there were some laugh out loud parts to this. For example, when Tasha is offered her new job, she first thinks it’s a prank from her best friend. And it’s definitely fun to read about someone moving to a new place, meeting new people, and just generally being a different kind of grown up than you will ever be. Tasha has worked primary from her computer and learns a lot about the professional world when she takes her real-time job.

However, to be honest, this book was a lot of work to get through. It’s not just that the book is long, which it is. It also seems like it was written in a different language and then translated and that some of the verbiage should have been cleaned up better for American readers. It made the character’s responses in certain situations seem disjointed and weird, I think. Which is too bad, I think the author spent a lot of time developing the characters. After learning that she is from a non-English speaking country (I looked it up, specifically), I was a bit less annoyed, but empathy didn’t make it easier. Also, there were a lot of punctuation and capitalization errors in the pdf that I received. These kept pulling me out of the story I was having a bit of a hard time getting sucked into already.

This book has nothing but glowing reviews, so I think that this is my editor’s brain really getting in the way for me. I would definitely try another book by the same author and hope for a stronger editing team.