The Big Love
Sarah Dunn, 2005
Little, Brown & Co.
256 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781616839604
Summary
Alison Hopkins isn't just looking for Mr. Right...or even Mr. Big. She's holding out for the Big Love.
When 32-year-old Alison's first real boyfriend unceremoniously dumps her—he steps out to buy mustard for a dinner party and never returns—it's time for Alison to re-assess her lifelong search for romantic fulfillment. Does true love even exist? Is every romantic involvement with a coworker inevitably doomed? Does sex without commitment always lead to disaster? Is a girl's evangelical Christian upbringing an impediment to her finding true happiness?
Funnier than any "chick-lit," as poised and accomplished as any literary debut this year, The Big Love is a big-hearted, hilariously entertaining novel that readers all across America are falling for. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—July 28, 1969
• Where—Phoenix, Arizona, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Pennsylvania
• Currently—lives in New York City
Sarah Dunn has moved from Los Angeles to New York five times, and from New York back to Los Angeles four times, which means, at the moment, she is happily residing in New York. The Big Love, her first novel, has been translated into 23 languages. Her second novel is Secrets to Happiness. (From the publisher.)
More
Sarah Dunn was born in Phoenix, Arizona. She went to the University of Pennsylvania, where she majored in English and graduated magna cum laude. After college, she wrote a humor column for the Philadelphia City Paper while waiting tables (poorly) at TGI Fridays. When she was 24, she published The Official Slacker Handbook, and was subsequently lured out to Hollywood to write for Murphy Brown, Spin City and Veronica’s Closet.
She left TV to work on her first novel, The Big Love, which came out in 2004 and has been translated into 23 languages. She is currently writing a television pilot for NBC called George & Hilly, and her long-awaited second novel, Secrets to Happiness, was published in 2009. She is married to Peter Stevenson, the executive editor of The New York Observer. (From the author's website.)
Book Reviews
The cover of The Big Love features a bed and the title in pink neon letters. It is an indication of the kind of opportunity that awaits any heroine in a flirty, effervescent novel of this genre. But the image also evokes, however back-handedly, the book's sense of a higher power. Alison already has one kind of big love in her life when she strikes out in search of something more earthly. It's a testament to this book's sparkle that Ms. Dunn is able to express all this in warm, good-natured fashion without raising hackles.
Janet Maslin - New York Times
A huge breath of fresh air delivered via witty prose…Thanks to Dunn’s snappy dialogue and quirky characters, The Big Love is a cut above the legions of books about single women in search of a few good men.
Chicago Sun-Times
A sweet-spirited first novel…The Big Love is about more than breaking up and moving on. Raised in an ultraconservative, uberevangelical Christian family, Alison fears that Tom’s departure is God’s way of judging her for premarital cohabitation…With this twist, Dunn elevates the novel from the predictable, with insightful exploration of a woman examining her faith.
Miami Herald
Before you roll your eyes at yet another hackneyed hunk of chick-lit featuring the requisite eccentrically spunky heroine who gets ditched but ultimately finds true love in the unlikeliest place, give The Big Love, Sarah Dunn's debut novel, a chance. The writing is fresh, the characters are just quirky enough without ever verging on cloying, and the ending —not to give it away—is hardly the happily-ever-after, misty-eyed Cinderella fable we've come to expect from those disposable Bridget Jones knockoffs.
Donna Freydkin - USA Today
Unapologetic chick lit…Alison is ruthlessly smart, terribly funny, and totally neurotic…The Big Love is a perfect sugary confection, with a surprising center of wistful wisdom…It’s like a highlights reel from Sex and the City. It’s that funny.
Lev Grossman - Time
For all his concern with the South, Faulkner was actually seeking out the nature of man. Thus we must return to him for that continuity of moral purpose.The annals of love have recorded many a humiliating breakup over the years, but Alison Hopkins gets hit with a humdinger in this surprising, touching and hilariously deadpan debut novel. When she sends her live-in boyfriend Tom to the supermarket right before a dinner party, she figures the worst that can happen is that he'll get the wrong mustard. Instead he calls from a pay phone to tell her he's not coming back at all, because he's fallen in love with his college sweetheart, Kate Pearce-with whom he's been sleeping for five months. If Alison were a Sex and the City siren, she'd distract herself with martinis, Manolos and misappropriated men, but she's a broke columnist for the floundering weekly The Philadelphia Times. Plus, though now lapsed, she was raised evangelist Christian. So it's a new pair of hiking boots, pie-contest judging and furtive dalliances with a coworker for reluctant good-girl Alison as she tries to gauge the ins and outs of the single world that non-fundamentalists mastered in their early 20s. Alison's struggles to fit into the mainstream world are fresh and full of wisdom, and Dunn's humor is marvelously dry: "Bonnie had a sudden flash of what he might come up with on his own so she drew a picture on a cocktail napkin of a wide band of channel-set diamonds, and she wrote down the words `platinum' and `size six' and `BIG' and `SOON.' " This is a delightful exploration of the empowerment that comes from escaping a Big Love turned Bad Love.
Publishers Weekly
When Alison Hopkin's boyfriend, Tom, whom she thought was "the one," decides to leave her right in the middle of a dinner party, Alison is understandably upset. She is also shocked, in denial, hurt, and ultimately furious. To make matters worse, things aren't going so well on the professional front either. Alison's editor at a Philadelphia alternative newspaper has bypassed her for promotion and instead hires Henry. Alison soon finds herself pretty darn attracted to Henry, but after all, isn't she supposed to be in love with Tom? We sympathize and agonize along with Alison as she struggles to identify the man of her dreams, find professional happiness and success, and finally become an adult. Written with charm and warmth, this entertaining first novel by a TV writer will attract fans of Helen Fielding, Jane Green, or Jennifer Weiner. Recommended for any public library with young and hip romantic fiction readers. —Margaret Hanes, Sterling Heights P.L., MI.
Library Journal
Discussion Questions
1. Do you think there is a bigger meaning to "the big love" of the title?
2. Have you ever been dumped unexpectedly? How did you react?
3. How did you think Alison's Christian background influenced her decisions? Did it seem to play a big role in the way she lived her life or was it more incidental?
4. How did the book's humor change the tone of the book? How would it have been different without the joking attitude?
5. Did Alison's archenemy strike a chord? Have you had any longstanding rivalries?
6. How important were Alison's friends in her life and her decisions? Did you think she should have listened to them more, or less?
7. Do you think Alison made the right choice by not taking Tom back? What about rejecting Matt? Would you have done the same?
8. What do you think Alison's decision is at the end of the book? Or did she even make one? What do you think happens next?
9. If it were you—what would you do?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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