I had high hopes for my latest Netgalley backlog pick as there was mention of lobster AND a midlife crisis, so this was right up my alley!!

This read more like fiction than nonfiction and I'm not really sure why. I don't like to comment too much on the content of a memoir because everyone's story is their own.

However, I could have done without the random cat tail found on the driveway chapter, so consider this a warning to all you animal lovers out there. The cat lives, so I guess I'll leave you with that...😬😬😬

Fact - Growing older comes with its challenges, but it also comes with the greatest rewards.

Thank you to Netgalley and Crooked Lane Books for the ARC.

A great book with an interesting writing style. But a good read all the same. Highly recommend this book. Thank you to both NetGalley and the publishers for gifting me this book,

Fun but serious book about a woman's life and all her moments, her struggles, setbacks, and celebrations. I read an ARC, so was distracted by every single page having "an entire line saying something about advance copy not for reader resale in between paragraphs, so it made for much slower reading. Other than that, good book. I appreciate the author, the publisher, and Netgalley for allowing me to review.

In the path of "Eat, Pray and Love", this book unfolds the life of the writer as she navigates mid-life crisis. Full of humor and relatable anecdotes, it was pleasant to read and sit back to think about your own life.

Thank you #NetGalley and Savio Republic for giving me the opportunity to read this.
#therewillbelobster #NetGalley

Thank you NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for my honest review. For some reason I just couldn’t get through this memoir and it covered a variety of topics I could relate to including depression, anxiety and mid-life as a woman. The book seemed to clunk along and it just was not particularly interesting.

There Will Be Lobster is a short read but packed with content. It chronicles a period of time in the author's life where she felt like everything had fallen apart. Jobless, directionless and utterly bereft of joy or hope, she was descending further and further into depression. Her children had left home and she saw no point in even getting dressed or showering. Sick and tired of feeling sick and tired, she found herself drawn to meditation and this daily practise helped her cope when she received a diagnosis of leukaemia.

I think this read more like an extended article than a memoir, focusing as it did on a short period of time. But nevertheless it was a moving account of one woman's midlife crisis in the true sense of the word.

There Will Be Lobster is not about Lobster. Although the lobster does make an appearance. The lobster in question (or questions) are a Road to Damascus moment, and for the author a symbol of hope.

Lobsters aside, this memoir is an honest account of a successful woman’s midlife crisis; her crash and burn (literally in a heap in the bathroom floor) and her picking herself and getting her life on track.

Sara’s crash and burn is brutal, and her children must have been saints for sticking with her. She leaves bits out of as in where the father of her children is. Where she gets her money when she is clearly out of work, and how does she survive in general. She also leaves her novel hanging there in that for me it just finishes– I came away with a burning desire to know who she was getting along now.

Maybe there will a second part, or maybe she felt that she had poured out enough of herself and it was time to get on with her life. And possibly she left the gaps because it was her memoir and she wanted to.

This memoir may not be for everyone but for me it’s a timely reminder of how life’s lessons and picking yourself up when you feel that you can’t.

This book was like a listing of all the things my 40-something year old friends and I have been saying about middle age. The author is self-deprecating, but not in a way that gets annoying or feels like a trope. Definitely recommended for readers that are interested in reading honest, true-life accounts of difficult periods in life.

I really wanted to like this book, but after a while, it began to be excessive whining. I wanted to shout at the author - “Get on with it!” I could understand her daughter not wanting to come home on college breaks. As a youngish senior woman, it was just too depressing for 98% of the book.

The roads we take in this journey are at times bumpy, smelly, twisted and brutal. All of these moments ring true in this at times tear stained adventure into a better understanding of why we endure. I challenge anyone to not giggle and experience a moment of clarity. A read to pass on for sure.

I really wanted to like this memoir, however the author's writing style was horrible and that made it extremely difficult to become interested in her story.

I loved the title of this book and the bold cover. That's about all I liked.

I found the author to be whiny and do wildly inappropriate things. She would say that her grown children were her life and then treat them so irrespectively. This reminded me a little of Eat, Pray, Love (which I also hated) in that the author seemed to whine and want to "find herself" but took no real actions and seemed to have money to sustain her anyway. This author never worried about money (strangely) which made it hard for me to really emphasize with her hardships. I did feel bad for hating her later in the book but she quickly reminded me why I couldn't root for her.

Thank you to NetGalley for the advance copy for review. We now know this book was not for me.

There Will Be Lobster is the story of a journey through depression and finding the light on the other side.

Sara Arnell had it all; loving husband and children, great job, beautiful home - and then, she didn't. First, she and her husband divorced. Then, one by one, her children went away to college, leaving just Sara in her beautiful home. The final blow came when Sara lost the great job that she loved.

There Will Be Lobster chronicles Sara's slide into the pit of depression, with help from a bottle. It relates hope when Sara's daughter moves back home, and accompany Sara's slow and arduous climb back into the light.

Part memoir and part self-help, There Will Be Lobster is a wonderful book for empty nesters and anyone else struggling with life.

In the interest of full disclosure, I received a free copy of this title to review from Net Galley.

#ThereWillBeLobster#NetGalley

It’s always hard to rate a memoir, because you feel like you are judging someone’s actions or beliefs. But for me, my rating on this book is not based on what the author did in the book, but on how the book was written.

For me, there were too many jumps in time, which left the story disjointed. I didn’t care about the author as much as I should have because the events did not connect. I also did not feel the pain she was going through. The writing felt robotic at times, like she was telling me what happened instead of showing me. The last 10% of the book was well written and I felt the pain. I just don’t think she dug deep enough to show us her pain. It felt like she didn’t want to be vulnerable. We never found out the source of the pain. Vulnerability is a must for a great memoir.

Thank you to Net Galley for a gifted e copy to read. This book will be published on September 1, 2021.

This is a woman’s journey thru a challenging time in her life (losing her job and children leaving home) which led her into depression. While sad, I felt the author did a good job of showing true feelings and obstacles and the essays were short enough to not drag. The author definitely has an advantage over most of us in that she didn’t seem to have to worry about money which isn’t realistic for most of us. This is a subject that should be discussed more and glad the author was willing to put herself out there.

Thank you NetGalley for providing me with an ARC in exchange for my honest review. Being a middle-age woman overrun with books about 20 somethings, I was excited to preview this book. We call all relate at some point to the issues in the book, however I found the manner in which they were told to be slightly off putting. I could not garner sympathy or understanding and I felt there was no result of deeper understanding or resolution. Because of this it was somewhat difficult to stay engaged in the story.

Thank you #Netgalley for the advanced read!

We follow Sara during her midlife crisis, she is single, her last child headed off to college, her company closed. What should she do? This follows Sara as she tries to navigate where she fits into the world by herself. I appreciated her honesty around addiction, depression, rejection, though at times it was a bit hard to read as I began to feel bad about what she was experiencing.

Memoirs are hard to review because this is someone's life. You either rate how much you enjoyed reading about that life or stay more generic and just review how well the book was technically written. I'm doing a little of both (but mostly the former) in this review.

As far as a technical review is concerned, this book is a 3.5 for me. It's a fine memoir. As a fellow middle aged woman, I got where the author was coming from. She nicely outlines her journey through depression and anxiety (while that's not how this book is being promoted, that is indeed what it is about.) The stories within it are vividly told with a cohesive narrative.

But sadly the story itself very much rubbed me the wrong way. As the author mentions at one point, her life was "filthy with compromise, self-loathing, and pity, and that's very much the tone of the entire book. That made reading the book feel like work for me, personally.

I know fellow women who have gone through horrible events in mid-life who did a lot of deep soul searching and were able to recover. So, reading about this woman bottoming out in the same (or lesser) circumstances but (and this is the important part) never diving deeper to understand the reasons why or seeking any help from anyone for her mental health was baffling. I wasn't looking for a rosy, sanitized tale. But I WAS looking for a transformative one, and this book didn't seem to provide that perspective.

I also found her relationships with her young adult children to be manipulative and lacking in boundaries, and reading about those interactions REALLY bothered me as a parent. At one point she says, "I'm your parent. I forget this a lot," and I couldn't help but agree. She treats her children like they are her friends. However, unlike the authors many other memoirs where parenting issues are in play, she never seems to have any reckoning with herself that this behavior is unhealthy for them both.

I guess I was willing to forgo all these things and rate my review at a 3-ish stars and leave it at that. Unfortunately then I doubled back and read the book's intro and that set me off.

In it, the author preemptively addresses the reason why she chose not to work on her mental health with a qualified professional by saying, "I rejected therapy because it felt like an insult to my intelligence." Holy wow is that a highly judgmental and unlikeable sentiment.

So by that logic are people who DO work with a therapist dumb? Is it better to wallow in your depression for a year and make your kids bear the burden of that experience? This line was kind of the final straw that broke the camel's back and made me drop my review to 2 stars.

I received an ARC of this book courtesy of NetGalley and the publisher in exchange for an honest review

I wanted more meat from this lobster. While I felt the ups and downs of the author's experience along with her, I felt it was written in a very superficial manner. Not to discount her difficulties, but it was like reading a recap instead of a deep dive into her feelings.

From the very first pages of the book, I could feel the author's despair. I had hoped to connect with this memoir, being in midlife myself. I'm not sure if the intent of the author was to keep a reader at arms length, but I felt Arnell was holding back, like she was skimming the top layer of her crises. I liked the style of writing, but was hoping for more emotion, more anecdotal experiences than what was delivered.