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    The Bette Davis Club
    The Bette Davis Club
    The Bette Davis Club
    Audiobook11 hours

    The Bette Davis Club

    Written by Jane Lotter

    Narrated by Sue Pitkin and Tessa Marts

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    The morning of her niece’s wedding, Margo Just drinks a double martini and contemplates the many mistakes she’s made in her fifty-odd years of life. Spending three decades in love with a wonderful but unattainable man is pretty high up on her list of missteps, as is a long line of unsuccessful love affairs accompanied by a seemingly endless supply of delicious cocktails.

    When the young bride flees—taking with her a family heirloom and leaving behind six hundred bewildered guests—her mother offers Margo fifty grand to retrieve her spoiled brat of a daughter and the invaluable property she stole. So, together with the bride’s jilted and justifiably crabby fiancé, Margo sets out in a borrowed 1955 red MG on a cross-country chase. Along the way, none of what she discovers will be quite what she expected. But it might be exactly what she’s been seeking all along.

    From acclaimed humor writer Jane Lotter comes this madcap, laugh-out-loud adventure, The Bette Davis Club.

    Revised edition: This edition of The Bette Davis Club includes editorial revisions.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrilliance Audio
    Release dateAug 30, 2016
    ISBN9781531866051
    The Bette Davis Club
    Author

    Jane Lotter

    Jane Lotter was a Seattle-based writer and humorist whose work has appeared in national publications. Her hilarious column, Jane Explains, ran in the Seattle Sun, winning several awards, including one from the Society of Professional Journalists. Jane’s only novel, The Bette Davis Club, won first place in the Mainstream category in the Pacific Northwest Writers Association Literary Contest.

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    Reviews for The Bette Davis Club

    3.5/5

    72 ratings4 reviews

    What did you think?

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    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      At first glance, this appears to be a fairly predictable novel. And in some ways, it is predictable. In other ways, it's a mess of a book—but in the best, most organic way. Sweet and quirky—with a flawed but endearing main character in Margo Just. It's a humorous, screwball comedy reminiscent of Bringing Up Baby (1938) or It Happened One Night (1934).

      For an added bonus, to further endear this book to you, read the Foreword by the author's daughter, Tessa Marts. Or, if you're listening to the audiobook—don't skip it...Tessa reads it herself.

      Audiobook, as read by Sue Pitkin: Pitkin did a lovely job of capturing Margo's voice. She breathed life into every character, but most especially Margo. I thought she handled the male voices really well, nobody sounded drugged or tired just to sound male, and the young, female voices were sometimes affected with a specific type of accent and breathiness that put me in mind of Marilyn Monroe in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes—a perfect Old Hollywood affectation befitting the thrum of the novel.
    • 4/5
      So hard to believe that Jane Lotter penned this upbeat story while battling cancer. Sadly she did not win her battle but she left us with an uplifting and engaging story.

      It is one of those books that I would have loved to write, because the protagonist does not fit with the usual trope of chick-lit heroines, she is middle-aged. She is also broke, trying to keep her business afloat and dealing with the general downturn in her life that apparently has been happening for some time. It sounded interesting to someone like me, who ticks one (or more) of those boxes. I have also joined the Bette Davis Club myself recently.

      Margo thought that she would escape her problems for a bit, when she appeared as a guest at her niece's wedding in Los Angeles. But the wedding festivities had barely started when the bride's mother, Margo's half sister Charlotte, enlists her to find the bride who had apparently ditched the idea of the wedding and her nerdy older groom. This is how the jilted fiance Tully and the bride's aunt Margo end up in a vintage red sport car driving to Palm Springs to find the runaway bride. The road trip lengthens into an adventure that Margo is ill-prepared for, and forces her to face a few truths.

      On the face of it, the story is a screwball comedy about a mismatched loser team trying to accomplish an unusual task by strange means. But it also about true love, and how difficult it is to get over it. It is about solace and second chances. It is also about taking responsibility and trying to fix the errors of your ways. Ultimately it is about hope. It is never too late to face up to old and new mistakes, and start from the top again.

      Thank you Jane Lotter for a sweet and uplifting story. God love you wherever you are as you left behind a smile and an uplifting read.
    • 5/5
      Margo, the unloved child grown into an unloved adult, tells us the story of her life of falsehoods. Martini in one hand, cigarette in the other, she takes a cynics perspective on her own life. How did she arrive where she did? The occasion for her musing is an impromptu chase from Malibu to Manhattan as she and Tully search for her niece and his fiancee who left him at the altar.Margo belongs to what her friend Dottie calls the Bette Davis Club — a club many of us have encountered as we cling to something we can’t have and probably doesn’t even exist. It’s not a club for people who want an authentic life, but its miseries provide their own dysfunctional comfort.Eventually, Margo leaves the club in favor of her own life.Lotter voices Margo’s story with a ring of experiential truth — which may be why so many readers find it laugh-out-loud hilarious. The wry humor is self-deprecating and true to life.
    • 4/5
      A good natured screwball-comedy combined with road-story and Hollywood satire.Got this as the Audible Daily Deal Jan. 11, 2017 and thoroughly enjoyed it. Probably it tied things up too neatly and quickly at the end but that can be forgiven in a first-time novel. The voice performance by Sue Pitkin was excellent.