[amazon_link id=”0385342675″ target=”_blank” container=”” container_class=”” ][/amazon_link]Title : I’ll Take What She Has
Author : Samantha Wilde
Genre : Women’s Fiction
Publisher : Bantam
Pages : 418
Source : Netgalley/Publisher ARC
Rating : 3.8/5

Nora and Annie, both living at Dixbie, a residential school campus, are best friends. Nora Galusha is a teacher, who desperately wants to have a baby. Annie is the mother of two energetic little girls, and wants more peace and quiet. While Nora is shy, Annie’s voice and opinions ring out loud. Nora admires caustic Annie’s directness, because “it pushed me forward in good ways”. And to Annie, quiet and kind Nora is “the counterbalance to the messiness in my life”. This firm friendship between two different personalities is tested when lovely and accomplished Cynthia Cypress joins the faculty at Dixbie.

“I’ll take what she has” seemed kind of chick-lit-y by it’s title, but it turned out to have a lot more heft. I’d been expecting a case of envy and nerves, but Wilde graces her characters with deeper, humorous thoughts.  Wilde sketches two very different characters but makes them real by giving them good and bad qualities. Nora and Annie are easy to sympathize with. When Nora spoke, I appreciated her kind and forgiving nature. When Annie spoke, I understood her mixed feelings on motherhood.

Truly, I believe that the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world. Unfortunately, that hand doesn’t make a dime on all that rocking, and in this cash universe, money makes for legitimacy. You can lullaby your little heart away, but no one’s going to give you a new wardrobe for it. You can birth and breastfeed a hundred children, but no one’s going to give you a paycheck at the end of the week. You can’t trade in your eighteen sippy cups for a Florida time-share or send in your child’s happy smile with your L.L. Bean order in place of a check.

Cynthia Cypress is the foil to Annie’s chaotic life and Nora’s humdrum existence; the adult version of the “popular girl” in high school. She’s beautiful, friendly, rich, well traveled, accomplished and gets her way by merely showing up; the crowds at Dixbie throng in adulation. And she is married to Nora’s ex-boyfriend, the handsome David. When Cynthia becomes good friends with Nora, Annie is left out in the cold, trying to sort out her feelings on friendship, motherhood and expectations in general.

“I’ll take what she has” is written in the first-person, two first-person accounts actually, because we get to hear from Nora and Annie. In Wilde’s unfussy, at times almost lyrical prose (I’ve bookmarked quite a few of the passages in my Kindle galley) these characters come alive. The book works it’s way down the rocky road of friendship; some ups, some downs and some in-betweens. We’ve been down some of those life paths, so we understand, and we follow along engrossed. Wilde does an outstanding job of putting life’s vagaries on paper for us to muse upon.

A pleasure to read, I highly recommend “I’ll take what she has”.