Playdate

I listened to this book. When listening to an audio book, the reader is a huge part of the enjoyment. I know the reader of this book has won some awards for her work. But I think she is too mellow. I almost fell asleep driving to work on day. This book is about two families and the relationship between the married couples and between the couples. Wren is married to Alec and Darlene is married to Lance. Alec and Darlene are opening a restaurant together and Lance and Wren are having an affair. Their kids are also friends. This book is a chick-lit book but also covers how different personalities can get along and not match each other. Do you have a job or a career. How do you categorize someone. It's not too deep of a thinking book but it's not bad. Good for the beach.

I enjoyed this book but I also liked Desperate Housewives. I agree with others saying that it is Desperate Housewives ish. It kept my interest and I enjoyed reading it and turning my mind off. It isn't thought provoking but not every book needs to be. Definitely chick-lit.

Playdate by Thelma Adams, who lives in upstate New York and is the film critic for US Weekly magazine, tells the story of Lance, Darlene and their ten-year-old daughter Belle. They have just moved to Encinitas from Barstow because Darlene is opening a restaurant with a new partner, Alex, who lives in their new neighborhood.Lance gave up his job as a TV weatherman in Barstow, and now he takes care of Belle and runs their new household. Darlene is spending a great deal of time with the demanding Alex, who has a plan to turn Darlene's Diner into a chain of restaurants like Marie Callender.Belle is not happy with the move. In Barstow she had friends and spent time out in the great outdoors. Encinitas is the "land of playdates, where every encounter is staged and scheduled". There are mean girls, led by Jade, who make her life very difficult. Jade and her friends even make fun of Lance because he is a stay-at-home dad and he runs the Girl Scout cookie drive.Lance is happy spending more time with Belle; they have a very close relationship that feels authentic. But his marriage to Darlene is suffering. She is all about work, and while Lance is home all day, he has strayed into a series of "playdates" with Wren, his neighbor and Alex's wife.The best part of the book is Lance and Belle's relationship. They are a loving father and daughter, and these two characters are the most well drawn of all. I can't say the same of Darlene; I felt like I didn't know her as well, maybe because the story centers more on Lance and Belle. I didn't really understand her very well at all.The only secondary character that had much dimension to her was Wren's nanny Julia, who has the hots for Lance. Julia has a hard edge to her, but at least she was interesting. You could really feel Lance's discomfort at Julia's aggressive attempts at seduction.I wouldn't give Playdates my highest recommendation, but it was worth reading for the warm, loving father-daughter relationship between Lance and Belle. It's not one you see very often.

This book was just so-so. I enjoyed the message which basically is it doesn't matter who raises the kids, all the jobs are important but they go hand in hand. It isn't just the moms who are important it is the dads too. However the affairs and the way the kids were just pushed through the book kinda irritated me. Also there seemed like parts that just went on and one with no real meaning. No one really had any depth to them, because if they did, they wouldn't be in those situations! All the guys except for Lance were painted as jerks, which today's society says they are if they go out and work for a living they are not "good fathers". This book is worth a read, but not much more

I tried to like this book, but the characters were just so brash and sometimes just over the top I couldn't like it. I felt like it was cliche, and as another review said, "DesperateHousewives," like....

This book isn't very good; but it's not really bad, either. The main problem was its superficial treatment of the people living in the kind of neighborhood.a Desperate Housewives viewer might recognize, without the murders, etc. I kept wanting the author to go deeper into characters, make them less identifiable as types. I mean types, not so much archetypes: a career woman who doesn't feel maternal enough; her husband, a stay-at-home who wonders if he should feel more emasculated, etc. Also, there was one character who was pretty vile, and probably the most interesting of the bunch and she just gets dropped out of the story, never to be heard of again. A secondary problem is the writing, which can be trite at times and mechanical at others. I wished she'd done more show, less tell. The attempt to link the Santa Ana winds with the upheaval in the characters' lives was heavy-handed. And the ending was absolutely, utterly implausible.But.I liked the way she smoothly segued from one character's view to another in the same scene. And, I kept flipping pages, so there was something that had me interested in how all of this would turn out. And occasionally, a really good insight would show itself. This book is not for sophisticated readers, but there are worse ways to spend a couple of hours.

Stay at home parents are very frequently undervalued in today's society. I know that when I chose to stay at home with my first child (and the subsequent two) I had to defend my choice. And a neighbor actually told his wife, in my hearing, that she was too smart to waste her brain and stay at home with their baby. Either I've chosen better friends or the stigma of staying home to raise children has eased some, at least for mothers, as I don't seem to hear this sort of thing much anymore. It does seem to be in full force still for stay at home dads though and it must be even harder for those men who have had the position thrust upon them instead of choosing it, regardless of how much they might actually enjoy full time at home. Men have long been identified by their job. Cooking meals, keeping house, raising children, doing laundry, and the like do not carry much prestige despite their importance, leading to the marginalization of those who do these tasks. Such is the fate of Lance, one of the main characters in Thelma Adams' new novel Playdate.Having moved to fulfill his wife Darlene's dream of opening a bigger and better version of her restaurant with an eye to franchising it out in the coming years, Lance cannot find another job as a meteorologist. Instead he throws himself into raising his and Darlene's daughter, being cookie dad for the local Girl Scout troop, and trying to convince his wife that the time is right for them to have another baby. Darlene is ambivalent about the baby idea, swallowed nearly whole by the upcoming launch of the restaurant and her rapacious, womanizing partner Alec. Of course, Lance is not exactly the model husband either, indulging in a tantric sex affair with Wren, coincidentally the wife of Darlene's partner, and protecting his secrets from the forward and conniving babysitter who thinks she can blackmail her own way into Lance's bed.The backdrop to this circular and scathing look at suburbia is the approaching Santa Ana winds, which are fanning the flames of an out of control fire even as the volatile situation between Lance, Wren, Alec, Darlene, and the babysitter takes unexpected turns, becoming as combustible and dangerous as the fire itself. Not only do marriages hang in the balance but so does the future happiness of the adults and children. Lance has spent a lifetime understanding a father's betrayal since his own father walked out on his family when he was just a child but he still cannot help cheating himself. In the role reversal of traditional expectations that the mother stay home and the father earn the living, Lance is minimized, marginalized, and emasculated. And yet his childhood baggage and adult situation do not make him a particularly sympathetic character. All of the other characters are as short-sighted and selfish as Lance is, leaving the reader to pity only daughter Belle, trapped in a situation not of her own making.The story itself chronicles a mere three days in the lives of these characters but they turn out to be pivotal days indeed. While the characters aren't necessarily likable, they are sly, entertaining, and often times quite humorous. The tension built slowly and dramatically as the pages passed and the Santa Ana winds blew their fire closer to the hearts of these characters' lives. An incisive look at modern morality, marriage, and job identification making the man (or woman), this novel has the same guilty pleasure feel to it that watching those train wreck reality shows does but it should spawn conversation on deeper issues than they do.

Thank you, Thomas Dunne Books, for this reviewer's copy. I enjoyed this quick read about a stay-at-home-dad and workaholic mom with a soon-to-be eleven year-old. They all struggled with their own problems and adjustments in these roles as they moved from Barstow to a SoCal community of Encinitas. There's also the womanizing business partner and the mostly obeisant wife, who also have issues. By the end of the novel, they all realize something from within and redirect their paths.I give it 2-1/2 stars because I wanted to know more about what happened to Dave, the reporter at the dinner party, and Julia, the babysitter.

Lance Ramsey is a stay-at-home dad of soon-to-be-11-year-old Belle, and husband to Darlene, who is opening the first in a planned series of Darlene's Diners, a sort of meet-all-needs hangout and refuge for kids and grownups alike. Lance is struggling with his ambivalent feelings of contentment in his role as primary caregiver to Belle, frustration at his (un)employment status and how that affects the way others (and himself) view him, and his unplanned but nurturing affair with the wife of Darlene's business partner. All this takes place over the course of a few days, in the shadow of impending wildfires spread by the San Diego Santa Anna winds. This all sounds a bit tawdry in a Lifetime channel sense, but this is actually a surprisingly smart, perceptive and satisfying novel that sheds a light on how the traditional roles of caregiver and breadwinner in marriage do not need to be so constricting.

"Playdate" has many definitions in this light, humorous story. Stay at home dad, Lance, faces the same problems of any stay at home mom...how to answer "what did you do today?" Part of the answer is "with playdates." But besides the triangulated relationships in this book, there is a basic message...."the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence." In this case, the grass burns!I give the writing a 5 start and story line a 2.5 star.

I found it hard to enjoy this novel; all the adults are nasty, unlikable people and the author isn't as funny as she thinks she is. All in all it reminded me of Little Children crossed with one of T.C. Boyle's California novels, and then diluted with a shot of Jennifer Crusie-ish "romance"/sex.

Although there were some redeeming features in this book having to do with ideas about the meaning of parenthood, they were buried in a soap opera like story of mixed up sexual attractions. I kept reading but never really liked any of the characters. The conclusion seemed contrived from the beginning. This was a very lightweight story and a quick read-----but not quite worth reading.

I found the main topic in the book was the affair between Lance and Wren, the spouses of the business partners. Normally, what I enjoy about chick-lit is the humor and the bonding of the characters; but these characters felt very isolated from one another and the book just wasn't funny. I would have never bought this book and would have been disappointed if I had to wait for it at the library.

Playdate by Thelma AdamsMeet Lance and Darlene Ramsay and . A middle class, suburban California couple with a ten year old (going on 40) daughter. The Ramsay family has recently moved from the desert town of Barstow to a lovely middle class neighborhood. Lance has left the business of being a weatherman to become a house husband and Darlene is on the verge of opening her first restaurant in what she hope becomes a chain that will give Ihop a run for it’s money. Lance is, although he will not admit it; dissatisfied with his life and has become the stud of their community. Tantric sex and a lot of Zen abound in a book that is about absolutely nothing other than the fact that it shows just how selfish and fool hardy these families are. I can see that the author is trying to make fun of the modern family, but this book doesn’t come off as funny. It just comes off as being pathetic. None of the characters are ones that I can have any feelings for. I just could not work up anything for this book. I do have one question…do ten year old girls really talk as if they are a bored with life forty year old? If you are still curious after all the reviews here about this book, take it out from the library as you will be sure to find that it will not be a “keeper” to be read over and over. Save a tree and your cash and stay away from “Playdate”.