Will You Won’t You Want Me 

by Nora Zelevansky

Women’s Fiction/Contemporary

Book Description

Marjorie Plum never meant to peak in high school. She was Queen Bee. Now, 10 years later, she’s lost her sparkle. At her bleakest moment, she’s surprised by renewed interest from a questionable childhood crush, and the bickering with her cranky boss—at a potentially game-changing new job—grows increasingly like flirtatious banter. Suddenly, she’s faced with a choice between the life she always dreamed of and one she never thought to imagine. With the help of a precocious 11-year-old tutee, who unknowingly becomes the Ghost of Marjorie Past, and a musician roommate, who looks like a pixie and talks like the Dalai Lama, Marjorie struggles with the ultimate question: Who does she want to be?

MY THOUGHTS: 2 out of 5 FLEURS DE LIS

Will You Won’t You Want Me? by Nora Zelevansky
I went into this book hoping for a story about an endearing relationship between an almost thirtysomething and a precocious preteen, but that is most assuredly not what I got. Instead, we get to watch Marjorie Plum stumble through a lot of bad decisions and have a lack or spine when confronted with any obstacle.

I’ll start off by saying that the author’s writing style takes some getting used to. There are often random facts and asides thrown in. We learn background information about characters that really have no bearing on the story at all. If you can get past that (I almost didn’t), then there is an alright story here.

Don’t get me wrong, there are a couple of funny moments. But many things that I guess were supposed to be funny, just didn’t rub me the right way. Marjorie, posing as her roommate, tells her young tutee at their FIRST meeting that the girl needs to read He’s Just Not that into You. WHAT. And for reasons I can’t fathom, the girl, Belinda, immediately aspires to be like Marjorie. This was after they’d known each other for all of ten minutes.

There’s a sort-of love triangle, and I say sort-of because I didn’t really feel much passion coming from any of the players involved. When Marjorie finally does decide to break up with the boyfriend she’s been leading on, it’s for a really ridiculous reason. With that being said, I’m not sure the guy she ends up with is all that much better than her.

Marjorie for sure does have some bad luck, but also has the ability to make terrible choices. In the end, she does cut some toxic people from her life. Things fall into place for her very suddenly and her life begins to look on the up and up. This book just left me feeling very flat and kind of meh. Empowered chick lit, this is not.

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About the Author

NORA ZELEVANSKY is the author of Will You Won’t You Want Me? and Semi-Charmed Life. Her writing has appeared in ELLE, T Magazine (The New York Times), Town & Country, the Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal and Vanity Fair, among others. She lives with her husband and daughter in Brooklyn, New York.