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    If You Were Here: A Novel
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    If You Were Here: A Novel
    Unavailable
    If You Were Here: A Novel
    Audiobook8 hours

    If You Were Here: A Novel

    Written by Jen Lancaster

    Narrated by Jamie Heinlein

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    The fiction debut of the New York Times bestselling author of My Fair Lazy.Told in the uproariously entertaining voice readers have come to expect from Jen Lancaster, If You Were Here follows Amish-zombie-teen- romance author Mia and her husband Mac (and their pets) through the alternately frustrating, exciting, terrifying-but always funny-process of buying and renovating their first home in the Chicago suburbs that John hughes's movies made famous. Along their harrowing renovation journey, Mia and Mac get caught up in various wars with the homeowners' association, meet some less-than-friendly neighbors, and are joined by a hilarious cast of supporting characters, including a celebutard ex- landlady. As they struggle to adapt to their new surroundings- with Mac taking on the renovations himself- Mia and Mac will discover if their marriage is strong enough to survive months of DIY renovations.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateMay 3, 2011
    ISBN9781101483589
    Unavailable
    If You Were Here: A Novel
    Author

    Jen Lancaster

    JEN LANCASTER is a New York Times bestselling author who has sold well over a million books. From Bitter Is the New Black to The Tao of Martha, Jen has made a career out of documenting her attempts to shape up, grow up and have it all—sometimes with disastrous results. Her novel Here I Go Again received three starred reviews (Kirkus Reviews, Booklist and Publishers Weekly). Her memoir I Regret Nothing was named an Amazon Best Book of the Year, and she’s regularly a finalist in the Goodreads Choice Awards. Jen has appeared on The Today Show, as well as CBS This Morning, Fox News, NPR All Things Considered and The Joy Behar Show, among others. She lives in Chicago with her husband and her many dogs and cats. Visit her website, jenlancaster.com, and find her on Twitter, @altgeldshrugged.

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    Reviews for If You Were Here

    3.5/5

    123 ratings18 reviews

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    • 4/5
      I found this entertaining and funny. It was enjoyable to read and I kept wondering what was going to happen next. This is a quirky couple. The footnotes were getting a little annoying and I quit reading them after awhile but I would recommend this book. Looking forward to reading more by Jen Lancaster. I hope they are as enjoyable as this one.
    • 4/5
      I gotta hand it to Jen Lancaster for writing a book of fiction! I loved her memoirs, but had a feeling that she would eventually run out of different ways to talk about her dogs, husband, weight, and life*.This story is about Mac and Mia, who buy the actual house used as Jake Ryans house in Sixteen Candles. I thought this story was very funny. Her sarcasm and humor are still there, and at times I forgot that this is fiction and was not her actual experience with moving to the suburbs. Probably not my favorite book she's written (Gotta give that to the original Bitter), but a very good start on what will hopefully be a long career writing fiction!*But here's hoping she thinks of others!
    • 3/5
      A silly book about a successful writer and her husband who decide to leave behind the crime-riddled streets of Chicago for a quiet suburban neighborhood. After many failed house-showings, they make a snap emotional decision to buy a crumbling mansion that was once featured in a favorite movie. The house needs a lot of work but they are confident that their DIY know-how and a competent contractor will be all it takes to rehab the home of their dreams. They are very, very wrong.
    • 1/5
      Tried as I might I just could not get into this book.
      I consider myself a Jen Lancaster fan, having read all of her books and I was pretty excited to read her entry into the fiction world. Add to that the fact that I am also currently under a house renovation and I was already psyched for some Jen Lancaster sarcasm laced humor.
      First, I had major issues separating Mia from Jenn. They sounded too similar and I got a little peeved at what seemed like a thinly veiled “fiction” attempt. What’s the real difference between Jenn and Mia aside from a few details?
      Add to that the far out plots ( i.e. Vienna) and I couldn’t get into it. What’s more I couldn’t even relate to the home buying and renovation process which was the least of my expectations. Ultimately gave up 2/3 of the way through the book and after a break. For me this reading experience included more eye rolling that laughing and at the end of they day, I was pretty bored with the story.
    • 4/5
      I gotta hand it to Jen Lancaster for writing a book of fiction! I loved her memoirs, but had a feeling that she would eventually run out of different ways to talk about her dogs, husband, weight, and life*.This story is about Mac and Mia, who buy the actual house used as Jake Ryans house in Sixteen Candles. I thought this story was very funny. Her sarcasm and humor are still there, and at times I forgot that this is fiction and was not her actual experience with moving to the suburbs. Probably not my favorite book she's written (Gotta give that to the original Bitter), but a very good start on what will hopefully be a long career writing fiction!*But here's hoping she thinks of others!
    • 3/5
      This is not her best work but it was still a fun book to read/listen to.
    • 4/5
      3.5 starsMia and Mac are married and desperately looking to buy a house and get out of their rental. When they are surprised to come across the mansion that Jake Ryan (the character from Sixteen Candles) “lived” in in their price range, Mia insists on jumping on it. Of course, it's a wreck, so the book follows the trials and tribulations of trying to get the mansion livable + dealing with snobby neighbours + Mia trying to write another book. I enjoyed this. It is Jen Lancaster's first novel, and yes, Mia and Mac sound very much like Jen and her husband, Fletch. I didn't find it as funny as some of her memoirs, but I still enjoyed it. I listened to the audio and I thought the woman who was narrating did a good job – that is, she sounded just like I felt like Mia (or maybe even Jen!) might sound.
    • 3/5
      If You Were Here by Jen Lancaster

      ★ ★ ★

      If you've read Jen Lancaster's many memoirs, your not missing much with her debut novel If You Were Here. Sure – it's cute and funny but it's pretty much just a fictionalized version of Jen's (and her husband's) life – if she bought a mansion with too many issues to fix and the antics that follow. Which I can see happening from reading her memoirs. Good book but nothing great. And I did enjoy the homage to late John Hughes.

      As a side note – I listened to the audio version of this book. The voice of narrator grinded on my nerves from beginning to end, which may have dampened my experience of this book.
    • 4/5
      Loved it! Laugh out loud funny. Light easy read that was hard to put down.
    • 2/5
      A tribute to director John Hughes and to DIY makeover shows. I enjoyed the chatty style of writing but got a bit bogged down by the DIY aspects in the second half of the book and I hadn't seen most of the movies that were referenced, so probably missed out on some of the whole point of the book there.
    • 4/5
      Mac and Mia are tired of the graffiti artist thugs in the neighborhood in which they rent their house. They decide it's time to take the plunge and buy a house in the Chicago suburbs. And not just any suburb in Chicago - they want to move to the suburb that John Hughes used for his movies' settings. They look at several homes but can't find their dream house. Instead they buy a fixer-upper that will test their home improvement knowledge and their marriage.I love Jen Lancaster. Because I've read all her memoirs and follow her blog, I feel like we're friends. (Don't worry, I'm not a crazy stalker!) If You Were Here is her first work of fiction but it's actually a thinly disguised memoir, in my opinion. Mac and Mia are Jen and Fletch. Some zany things happen to Mac and Mia that wouldn't happen to Jen and Fletch in real life but their personalities are the same. This didn't bother me but I think that if you aren't a Jen Lancaster fan already, you may not connect with this book as much as I did.Some of the dialogue was stilted and some of the explanations of home-buying terms sounded too much like a real estate manual. However, the story was amusing and engaging. This would be a great beach read.This book has tons of footnotes just like Jen's other books so I'm not sure if it would be good to read on an e-reader.
    • 5/5
      So much fun to read. I related somewhat to what was going on in the book, since I'm in the middle of renovating our house as well. Thankfully, I don't have Mia's problems! I was thrown when I first started reading this though - I brought it home without reading anything about it - just saw Jen's name on the front, and knew I'd be entertained by it. Two pages in, I was saying to myself, - "what happened to Fletch, and how did I miss a divorce and a new spouse?" I stopped and read the inside front cover, and began again with a fresh perspective - this is not a Jen Lancaster memoir - but it reads like one. In fact, I forgot most of the time that this is fiction, and did not, in fact, happen to Jen. Still has her funny footnotes, sarcasm, and quick wit. ANyone who loves her memoirs will love this just as much.
    • 5/5
      Funny look at how home renovation is always much more time-consuming and complicated than what one planned.
    • 4/5
      For those who read my blog (anyone?), you'll know that I am a big fan of Jen's. I'll read pretty much anything she writes, from her memoirs, to her blog, to her Twitter feed. I jumped right into If You Were Here, right after it was released (I'm just late with the review). This is Jen's first novel and it is just a ton of fun. Mac and Mia buy a house. Not just any house, Jake Ryan's house. If you are around my age and female, your heart gave a little thump at the mention of Jake's name. Right? Mac and Mia buy the house used in the movie Sixteen Candles. Unfortunately the house has seen better days and can use some help. It does have a panic room so that's a bonus.The story is about a couple, a house, and their attempts to make it a home. Anyone who has done construction on a home knows the things that can go wrong and in this book, it all goes wrong. If You Were Here, is not a literary masterpiece but it's a hilarious look at real people and real situations. It's typical Jen and if you love her, you'll love this. It will make you laugh.
    • 2/5
      Jen Lancaster usually writes humorous memoirs about her life with her husband and dogs, her family and friends. This is her first foray into writing fiction. Turns out it is a thinly-disguised story about her life with her husband and dogs, her family and friends. To be fair, I haven't read any of her other books and they are supposed to be quite good, or at least some of them are. She wrote Bitter is the New Black and My Fair Lazy, along with a few others. Her style of writing would work better in memoirs. Fiction needs a much stronger plot. It started off okay in a lightweight summer beach read sort of way. Mia, a writer of teenage Amish romance novels, and her husband Mac are fed up with their city neighborhood and go looking in the Chicago suburbs for a house to buy, one that they can use the skills they learned from watching HGTV. Mia finds the perfect house, one used in the movie Sixteen Candles, a film by John Hughes whose films she adores. She grew up longing to live in the homes she saw in his films. The house turns out to be more work than they thought it would be. The book is filled with pop culture references and sarcastic asides (mostly in footnotes) which are funny sometimes although I wonder how many of them most readers would get. There are many references to HGTV programs and John Hughes movies but also to the movie Mean Girls and Stephenie Meyers and Mr. T and Charles in Charge and so on and so on, so many that the weight of them was just too much for the weak plot that it eventually fell in on itself, just like the floor did in the book under the weight of the dropped toilet. Things I liked about it: It really was funny in parts. It's also exciting in a way when you "get" a cultural reference. Makes me feel like part of a club or something. Things I did not like about it: The thin plot combined with the overuse of footnotes and pop culture and too much cutesiness (the landlord was a trust-fund 20-something named Vienna Hyatt) got to be too much for me. Another issue for me was the excessive profanity. Would I recommend it? No, not really. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    • 3/5
      Mia and Mac buy a money pit mansion in an upscale neighborhood for sentimental, John Hughes-related, nostalgic reasons and remodeling threatens to destroy their marriage. Readers familiar with the "joys" of remodeling will laugh-out-loud (or possibly cry) but non-DIYers may wonder why Mac & Mia don't cut their losses and get out before this house ruins their lives.
    • 2/5
      I love all of Jen's books, but I have to say that this one was my least favorite. Please go back to memoir writing, Jen.
    • 5/5
      I adore Jen Lancaster's memoirs. Their style; fast-paced and loaded with laugh out loud funny bits and pop culture references galore, is, in my reading experience, hers alone. But it became tedious when not spaced out, as I discovered when I caught up on her work a couple of years ago. They are much, much more palatable spaced out - say, if they're snapped up and devoured as soon as they're released, as I've done her last two books. That much space between them is perfect, and when I recommend her books - and I ALWAYS recommend her books - I tell people this.Jen enters fiction territory with If You Were Here. Except not really. This is not a bad thing; her protagonists, Mia and Mac, are Jen and Fletch. There was no way for me to separate Mia and Mac from Jen and Fletch. The fiction part came in handy with the outrageous and sometimes absurd adventures in buying and "rehabbing" a house in the Chicago suburbs, while Mia is trying to put out the next novel in her YA series about Amish zombies. The supporting characters are fantastic, though thinly veiled, and fit perfectly - as they should - into Mia's and Mac's world.Some may not like the complete lack of departure from her memoirs, but I adored this book, and continue to be a huge fan. It got me through a hellish all-night bout of insomnia - and was a quick read under those circumstances. My only quibble is that the footnotes - hilarious though they were - seemed out of place in a novel. They didn't transfer well to me. But otherwise, I remain a huge, huge fan.