Book Review: Something Blue

Title: Something Blue (Darcy & Rachel #2)
Author: Emily Giffin
Date Published: June 1, 2005
Rating: 3/5 stars
Date read: March 22, 2020 (reread)

Something Blue follows 29-year-old Darcy Rhone, who has just learned of her fiancé’s infidelity after catching him with her best friend. Darcy’s no saint either and has been sleeping with one of the groomsmen, Marcus, but still views this act between her best friend and ex-fiancé as unforgivable. Without fully thinking things through, she decides she is going to marry Marcus and have his baby. Marcus is not overjoyed by this turn of events and eventually dumps Darcy. Pregnant and with no one to turn to but her friend Ethan, she moves into his flat in London.

Something Blue is the companion novel to Something Borrowed and while the books do not have to be read in order, I would not recommend reading them out of order. 

Boy, did Something Blue not age well. I think that if most readers pick up Something Blue now they’ll find the writing insensitive and harmful, and some of the content problematic. I don’t think this is too much of a spoiler because it happens in the beginning of the novel, but at some point Darcy decides, pretty spur of the moment I might add, that she wants a baby, so she doesn’t let Marcus pull out. Marcus is not pleased with this since he doesn’t want a child. This made me SO uncomfortable. The novel is also told in first person narrative through Darcy’s perspective and she often belittles people based on their looks. We’re not meant to like Darcy or support the things she says, but that didn’t stop some of her remarks from making me cringe. 

My biggest issue, problematic content aside, was the pacing of this novel. It takes half the book for Darcy to move to London, which in my opinion is when the story really starts to pick up, so for half the novel we’re in the head of a terrible person who cares only for herself. I’m not against unlikeable characters, but she was starting to get unbearable at the quarter mark and I considered DNF-ing. Darcy also goes through some extreme character changes in order to try to improve herself, and while I do like this aspect of the novel, her progress happened much too quickly for me to find her changes believable. I also just don’t like how much she changed since all of a sudden all her interests were different too. The novel also seems to give off this message that in order to be a good person you need to have a career that helps people, which rubbed me the wrong way. Another, much smaller issue I had was the ending, it felt a bit rushed and I would have liked to see Darcy’s relationship play out a bit more, it was also incredibly cheesy.

So why the three-star rating? I read Something Blue a long while ago and it still holds nostalgia for me. Darcy and her love interest are still, to this day, one of my favourite couples. This novel has two of my all-time favourite romance tropes and I can’t help but have a soft spot for any novel where one of the conflicts is a friend breakup. Friend breakups are such a difficult thing to experience and I don’t think enough novels explore them. I thought the relationship between Rachel and Darcy was one of the best and most believable parts of the novel, and while it’s not something that is actively present, it is something that serves as a major hurdle for Darcy and something that she dwells on a lot. 

Overall, would not recommend. 

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