A Bump in the Road is an easy and entertaining read. It follows Clare Finnegan, who works at an event planning firm in Chicago, and also has her own blog, in which she keeps her readers updated on the everyday happenings in her life as she unexpectedly finds out she is pregnant. This forces Clare and her husband to completely change their newlywed partying lifestyle for a more child friendly one, which takes just about nine whole months for them to do. The book progresses via a timeline as opposed to chapters, where the time is not just kept track of by days, but hour by hour as well. This seems to give the reader a more personal connection to Clare’s character, and makes it easier to relate to her. For example, we all have that night where we know we shouldn’t go out because we’ll end up spending an unnecessarily large amount of money on drinks and cab rides, in addition to looking and feeling like crap the next morning when we actually have important things to do, but we end up going out anyway against our better judgment, which is something Clare is quite accustomed to:
“6:30 p.m. I heard that bar is lame anyway.
6:35 p.m. I don’t even like cranapple martinis.
6:38 p.m. I don’t have anything to wear.
6:49 p.m. I’m having a bad hair day.
7:02 p.m. Ok, we’ll go, but just one drink. We can still come home and get to bed at a reasonable hour. One drink each, which is only ten dollars, plus free appetizers. That’s like making money.
8:30 p.m. One and a half drinks wont kill me. Jake’s already had three. Oh, they have four-dollar flirtinis?
10:04 p.m. Little drunk. Who cares?
12:17 a.m. Wasted. Jake hammered. Love cat. Love life. Love cranapples thing” (21-22).
The most amusing parts of the book are the antics of Clare’s coworker, whom she has nicknamed “Mule Face” due to her much-too-large-for-her-face veneers. We all have that one person at work who seems to get on our last nerve, every hour of the day, and no matter how hard we try, we cannot escape them or their god-awful stories about their personal life, “Apparently she has a new boyfriend she met on the internet. His name is Dwight but she calls him Big D. It’s his screen name, and I will assume the ‘D’ stands for his name and not anything else. Based on the photo she emailed to everyone, he has a severely receding hairline and slightly resembles a frog. Nothing gives me more pleasure than watching her show Big D’s picture to someone, seeing their initial reaction of shock/horror, and then watching them quickly try to cover it up by complimenting his orange striped shirt or something. . .its times like these that I wish I could talk about work on my blog. I’d love to post a picture of Mule Face’s feathered bangs and watch the comments fly” (44-45).
Although there are plenty of humorous anecdotes such as these spread throughout the novel, I couldn’t help but be appalled by the fact that Clare continues to drink wine after she finds out she is pregnant. She is constantly complaining about how all she wants is to be able to be drunk but cannot do so for the next nine months, and yet she continues to have a glass of wine that she “and the baby” greatly enjoy and need. There have been several studies done, in which majority of them say that even a single glass of wine can lead to fetal alcohol syndrome, and that there is no such thing as “a safe amount” to drink while pregnant. You would think that being a mother herself, Lipinski would know this and thus, not encourage such behavior in her novel. I also wish that she would have spent more time describing her main character Clare, and her husband Jake. The reader has no idea what either of the two look like, nor what type of personalities they have as the book jumps into their lives while they are flying home from a trip to Vegas as newlyweds. The lack of details continue whenever Clare’s blog is mentioned, as she only vaguely alludes to the fact that it’s a place where she talks about her personal life. It is somewhat confusing to the reader when Clare has random “fans” come up to her in public and compliment her on her blog, and not to mention when she gets a call from the Chicago Tribune telling her that they love her work and want her to be a columnist for their paper, especially since the reader never gets to see any entries of her blog. These days, many people have personal blogs, so what was it about Clare’s that led to her having such a large following?
Another thing that left me feeling somewhat unfulfilled was the absence of great Chicago sites. Why is it that every time a book is set in New York (example, Guilding Lily) the author makes it a point to describe in detail all of the hot spots and places to be seen, such as Bergdorf Goodman or Butter, but cannot do the same for a book set in Chicago? As a Chicagoan I was very excited to read a book about a young married woman living a fabulous life in the city, so I could read about which neighborhood she lived in, what her commute to the city would be like, and all of the fancy restaurants and bars she frequented. But other than a single mention of a shopping trip to Michigan Avenue, and a dinner at Emilio’s, the benefits of reading a book set in Chicago were never reaped. Although Chicago is no New York City, we have plenty of places to see and be seen, and it would have been nice if the author had played those aspects up a little bit.
All in all, A Bump in the Road is an amusing tale of a young couple trying to live their life, but get thrown off course as they have to deal with an unexpected baby who makes balancing their personal and professional lives a hilarious challenge.