Review: 52 Reasons to Hate My Father

By Jessica Brody
Available now from Farrar Straus Giroux (Macmillan)
Review copy

When I stopped by the Macmillan both during TLA, I told the woman working that I was suffering from paranormal fatigue.  Thus, she sold me on two upcoming contemporaries.  The first of those two is 52 REASONS TO HATE MY FATHER, about a rich girl forced to work in menial jobs for a year before she can access her trust fund.  It sounded like fun and I started to read it that very night.

I read a couple of chapters and put it down for more than a month.  Lexington Larrabee is a tough woman to handle in the beginning.  She's captious and spoiled, steamrolling over people without a second thought and throwing tantrums that would embarrass a five-year-old.  You want her to take the fifty-two minimum wage jobs her father lines up for her so that she can see what the real world is like.  Anything to make her more bearable.  But it's hard to side with her father.  He's distant and cold.  Even when changing the course of his daughter's life, he delivers the news through an intermediary.

Soon Lexi is working and learning nothing more than being a maid or a grocery store clerk really sucks.  The story really starts moving as Lexi begins to change her life and become more involved with the world around her.  On top of being a better person, a bunch of subplots kick in.

Luke, the intern who keeps track of Lexi's liaison, is a decent love interest.  He's quite the foil to Lexi - in college on a scholarship, serious and driven, cautious and a bad dresser.  I don't think girls will be running around proclaiming that they're Team Luke, but he had good chemistry with Lexi.  I always love relationships more when they're built up through lots of interaction and conversation.

By the time I got halfway through 52 REASONS TO HATE MY FATHER, I couldn't put it down.  After the rough start it's an infectious summer read.  It lives up to the promise of its cover.  If you're suffering from paranormal fatigue, you could do worse than Jessica Brody's 52 REASONS TO HATE MY FATHER.