Story for the Week
Anyone who knows me well knows that I enjoy Shakespeare (“All the World’s a Stage”🎭). Some of my most vivid college memories come from Shakespeare—both from the course I took senior year as well as from the trip we took to the Stratford Festival in Ontario, Canada.
I loved that trip…one of my best memories. Our English professor took a van full of us for a few days. We stayed in bed & breakfasts, attended three or four plays, and went to the pubs in the evenings because they were really the only thing open. That trip marked my first time traveling outside the U.S. In those days, you just needed a birth certificate to cross the border. I tried Guinness for the first and only time (never again 🤮). And it cemented my love of Shakespeare.
Corinne used to give me a hard time about taking a Shakespeare course in college. Honestly, I give her a hard time about taking five years of math for high school when she only needed three to graduate. We all have our preferences. 🤷🏻♀️ But she’s a theater kid, so I’ve always said I think maybe she just needs to see Shakespeare performed to appreciate him.
She recently completed a semester abroad at Liverpool Hope University as part of her university’s honors program. She’s a musical theater major, so her application for the global program talked about theater culture in the U.S. versus the U.K. She hoped to experience it first-hand.
One of the organized events included a weekend in London. While they didn’t see a Shakespeare play, they did tour Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre (and I’m totally jealous). She even bought a souvenir for me there—William Shakespeare: The Complete Plays in One Sitting. About 3 inches tall, the book contains iconic quotes, a character list, and a synopsis of each play. The 328 miniature pages don’t hold a candle to the 1,900+ page The Riverside Shakespeare I still own from my college class, but at least it doesn’t take up a lot of space on my desk.
Corinne is home for the summer now, and she’s trying to work close to full-time hours. She traveled a lot while in Liverpool, but I feel like we should do something together before she starts her fall semester. I started thinking about short trips that wouldn’t necessarily cost a lot.
Stratford…Stratford is a short trip. Seven hours one way, we could easily make it with only one stop along the way. And one of the shows this season is Macbeth. When I mentioned it to Corinne, she said she would enjoy seeing Macbeth. The girl who chided me for loving Shakespeare when she read Hamlet would like to see Macbeth. 🤔
I’ll turn her into a Shakespeare fan yet. It might also have something to do with the fact that she can legally hit a pub or two while we’re there, but I’m going with the Shakespeare angle. 😉
The main character in the book reviewed below wrote a play based on Ophelia from Hamlet. Her life, however, seems to turn into it’s own kind of tragedy.
Book Review
⭐⭐
2 Stars for So Happy Together by Olivia Worley
304 pages
Publisher: Minotaur Books
Publication Date: June 3, 2025
I received an advance copy of this title from NetGalley and Minotaur Books.
Publisher’s Description
Jane and Colin are soulmates. He just doesn’t know it yet.
For 24-year-old Jane, finding love in New York City is even harder than making it as a playwright. So when Jane meets Colin, she can’t believe her luck: they’re perfect for each other. Even when Colin breaks off their relationship after six dates, Jane knows this is just a stumbling block. She’ll get him back. She knows she will.
That is, until Colin starts dating Zoe―perfect, luminous Zoe. Even worse, she’s actually kind of nice. But Zoe doesn’t have what it takes to love Colin. All Jane has to do is prove it, and they’ll be so happy together.
But when Jane sneaks into Colin’s apartment, she makes a shocking discovery―one that will ensnare them all in a dark web of lies, secrets, and murder.
************
Main Characters:
- Jane Williams – 24 years old, playwright who lives in New York City, edits college application essays for a living, graduated from New York University, focused on winning back Colin who broke up with her several weeks ago after six dates
- Zoe Ember – an artist and influencer who lives in Brooklyn, Colin’s new girlfriend who befriends Jane
- Colin Hillgrove – 24 years old, software engineer who graduated from Penn, tells Zoe that he and Jane we in the same dorm at Penn to explain how he knows her
- Ben MacKenna – comedian, grew up with Colin, Colin’s best friend and current roommate
Based on the description, this book held a lot of potential. Jilted lover Jane sets her sights on winning back her ex Colin. In the process, she befriends his new girlfriend Zoe who thinks Jane and Colin know each other from living in the same dorm in college. Jane actually likes Zoe but believes that Colin is her soulmate. She clearly can’t have them both.
From the Prologue, we know that something has come to a head as the narrator, Jane, raises a knife. Chapter 1 takes us back three weeks with Jane on a date with Axel, who she met on a dating app. But she’s not interested in Axel. She has been going on dates every Friday for the past eight weeks at Colin’s favorite restaurant. Jane hopes to “accidentally” run into Colin to make him realize he made a mistake breaking things off.
After the date with Axel where Colin did she her, she scrolls through TikTok and happens across a video created by Colin’s date. Zoe’s video describes how to make your “Special Person” obsessed and how to manifest his desire to send you a text “like that.”
Jane is clearly the one obsessed, though, so much so that she begins stalking Zoe’s Instagram account the next morning. She discovers that Zoe is an up-and-coming artist with new gallery space. When she recognizes the logo of a coffee shop in Zoe’s Instagram post during a date with Colin, Jane searches for the shop closest to the gallery space. She knows that Colin likes long dates, so she takes the train into Brooklyn on the chance of running into him again.
While Jane forces herself not to look around the coffee shop for Colin, Zoe approaches her in line and invites her to join them at their table. Zoe wants to know what Colin was like in college because he told Zoe that’s how he knew Jane. Before they part ways, Zoe asks if they will see Jane that Friday at Colin’s birthday party. Colin absolutely wants nothing to do with Jane, but he can’t say anything without telling Zoe the truth. Jane, on the other hand, takes the opportunity to spend time with Colin to make him realize what he’s missing.
This gets us about 10% of the way through the story, and a lot happens in that 10%. However, the plot really slows down from there and becomes more about Zoe and Jane becoming friends, Zoe inviting Jane to things, Zoe trying to set Jane up with Colin’s roommate Ben. Jane tells Zoe about a play she wrote focused on Ophelia from Hamlet, and Zoe wants to read it because she always felt Ophelia was the most interesting character. And as much as Jane likes Zoe, she still maintains her focus on trying to win Colin back.
I was feeling like this would be a solid 3 stars. It held my interest, but it was slow. And the longer I read, the more I wanted the story to get moving. When it finally did, it became so chaotic (see spoilers below), and I really disliked the ending. It just feels like the author decided to throw everything into the mix to see what would stick. The author’s first two novels were young adult. This is her debut in adult fiction.
***SPOILERS*** SPOILERS***SPOILERS***
When the book starts, we assume that Jane is the only obsessed character. The entire story comes from her first-person point of view, so that makes sense. But when every character becomes a whack job with no rhyme or reason, that’s just an epic fail for me.
Let’s talk about Jane first. Jane truly is obsessed with Colin, but we have no idea why. When his roommate Ben warns her to be careful, she ignores him. When she finds a knife wrapped in a bloody sweatshirt in Colin’s drawer and overhears him yelling at someone on a phone call, she ignores all of it and chooses to still pursue him. When she sees him standing over his dead roommate with a knife, she actually helps him make Ben’s death look like a burglary gone bad.
Colin seems to be being stalked by a mysterious “Leigh,” who reaches out asking if he misses her. Zoe and Jane discover that Leigh is Ben’s ex from college who drowned in a bathtub, and they suspect Colin of killing her. After Ben’s death, Colin goes home. Zoe invites Jane to go with her to his hometown. While Colin and Zoe go for a walk, Jane finds a shoebox full of information about Leigh, so she becomes confident that Colin DID kill Leigh. Jane and Zoe leave and decide they will confront Colin to get him to confess to Leigh’s murder at Zoe’s art show—a show that will also feature part of Jane’s play where Ophelia…drowns in a bathtub.
Zoe turns out to have been Leigh’s best friend and tells Jane she always believed Colin killed Leigh. She came across Colin on the dating app and figures he dated Jane because she looks a little like Leigh. Leigh introduced Zoe to Colin as Zee only once, so she pursues him, confident he won’t remember her. She also started stalking him as Leigh and researching Jane. When Zoe discovers that Jane’s father killed himself after her mother died, she suspects that Jane actually killed me (she did). Because of that, she befriends Jane, thinking she can use Jane to get back at Colin.
In the end, Zoe drugs Colin at the art show and ties him up in an abandoned warehouse. She and Jane confront him about everything. He tries telling Jane that he loves her and that Zoe manipulated him. When Jane asks why he ended things with her, he says he thinks he wanted her to be Leigh but then he realized that wasn’t fair. He tells Jane that sometimes she made it too easy for him and that’s always been kind of a turn-off for him. That’s when she kills him?
Fast forward to six months later, Jane moved in with Zoe. Jane wrote and Zoe is directing an off-Broadway play. Colin hasn’t been seen since the art show, and his parents received an e-mail from his account confessing to Leigh’s and Ben’s murders.
Zoe leaves early to get ready for the show, and Jane looks for something in Zoe’s nightstand drawer. She finds Ben’s phone as well as Zoe’s copy of Hamlet. Tucked inside is an article about Leigh’s death. The article confirms that Leigh died of a drug overdose, which is what Colin told her before she killed him. So now Jane knows that Colin was innocent and that Zoe killed Ben, but she just puts everything back in the drawer and closes it.
WHAAAAAT?!?!
Like I said, too much chaos. Do not recommend. 🙂↔️
If you enjoyed this post, please comment below. Subscribe for regular updates, and share it with your friends. If you’re interested in starting a conversation, send an email to booksundertheblanket@gmail.com.
As an Amazon affiliate, I earn a small commission at no cost to you when you make a purchase using the links on my site.
