Description:
The story of a solitary green notebook that brings together six strangers and leads to unexpected friendship, and even love
Julian Jessop, an eccentric, lonely artist and septuagenarian believes that most people aren’t really honest with each other. But what if they were? And so he writes–in a plain, green journal–the truth about his own life and leaves it in his local café. It’s run by the incredibly tidy and efficient Monica, who furtively adds her own entry and leaves the book in the wine bar across the street. Before long, the others who find the green notebook add the truths about their own deepest selves–and soon find each other in real life at Monica’s café.
The Authenticity Project’s cast of characters–including Hazard, the charming addict who makes a vow to get sober; Alice, the fabulous mommy Instagrammer whose real life is a lot less perfect than it looks online; and their other new friends–is by turns quirky and funny, heartbreakingly sad and painfully true-to-life. It’s a story about being brave and putting your real self forward–and finding out that it’s not as scary as it seems. In fact, it looks a lot like happiness.
The Authenticity Project is just the tonic for our times that readers are clamoring for–and one they will take to their hearts and read with unabashed pleasure.
This is another book club read. I am having fun with this book club. 😊 I didn’t choose this book, but I did like the sound of it and had hoped that it would be a book I would enjoy. Unfortunately the book chat with the other girls is what I enjoyed best.
My Thoughts:
The Authenticity Project had such a good premise. I was expecting the book to be thought provoking, hopeful and inspiring. In actual fact the book to me was kind of like a fairy tale.
The plot consists of a notebook which is found and left again for strangers to write their truth, not perhaps how they portray themselves. Sounds good doesn’t it? And although I started off the book liking and finding some of the characters interesting and quirky, as the pages turned I found them to be silly and a bit unrealistic.
This book has many great reviews and I wonder if my higher and different expectations spoiled my read of this book?
On a positive note for the book, it was easy to read and I could fly through the pages as there was not a lot of food for thought. ( although my book club friends and I did find plenty to talk about).
We discussed as a group about how we see ourselves is often not the way other people see us. The author does show that with this idea of the truth notebook seeing yourself as others see you, in a wider more positive way can open more doors for you. I would have liked this book to have more inspirational characters and chat than it did.
Although I couldn’t relate to any of the characters, I found one of the characters called Monica very much like Monica from Friends. I wonder if that is coincidence or if the author modelled the characters on people she knew of.
I read that the author took some of her own experience and added it to this book. And despite the author having a previous book called The Sober Diaries, ( based on her experiences) I am of the opinion that one of the characters who had an addiction problem was written in a way that other addicts may find annoying and perhaps offensive. The addict in the book seemed to me to find it far to easy to overcome his problems.
Sadly this was not the book for me and I won’t be reading anymore from this author. However that is just my opinion and as I previously mentioned many others loved it. I would recommend The Authenticity Project to readers who like an easy breezy read with not much substance to it and a kind of “happy happy “ read.
