There are certain authors that I make a point of trying to read all of their books:  Jane Green, Jodi Picoult, Lisa Genova, Elin Hilderbrand…just to name a few. Emily Giffin is also one. Although her characters sometimes seem shallow or her storyline seems far-fetched, periodically I need a little bit of romance and fluff in my reading repertoire. I was a bit surprised, however, when a friend told me that Emily Giffin’s newest book was mostly about football. Football?! After hearing this, I decided I would still give this book a try, but knew I might not be very into the story. (I’m not really a sporty girl. I don’t mind reading about soccer and basketball, but football just doesn’t appeal to me.) I made it through The One & Only and I don’t even have any huge complaints. What a surprise that was.

In a nutshell, this is a book about a woman who loves her job so much that it basically makes her who she is, and this makes her a bit sad. She wishes she could be more like the women around her, but she has always been a tomboy who relates better to men than women. This gets her into some trouble though, and thus we are served up a story that is a lot of football and romance.

The minor issues I did have with this book was it felt like it had an over-abundance of language and profanity (something I don’t normally notice), and of course, the sports aspect. Other than that, the story was interesting enough. If you like sports a lot, you will probably like this book a lot.

Content Analysis:

Profanity/Language:  7 religious exclamations; 21 mild obscenities; 4 derogatory names; 10 scatological words; 6 anatomical terms; 11 F-Word derivatives.

Violence/Gore:  Several brief scenes of domestic violence/physical abuse; several instances of verbal abuse; a miscarriage is mentioned with no detail; a person dies of natural causes.

Sex/Nudity:  Adults kiss multiple times; sex is referred to multiple times; two explicit/detailed sex scenes are described involving some nudity; sexual activity without explicit detail between adults mentioned; shirtless boys/men are briefly mentioned in a locker room; non-sexual depictions of nudity mentioned; touching/caressing between adults is mentioned; an affair is referred to several times; pregnancy out of wedlock is mentioned; men and women are referred to as “hot” and “sexy”; rape is mentioned to have occurred, with no detail.

Mature Subject Matter:

Death, personal crises.

Alcohol / Drug Use:

Adults drink; minors drink; smoking marijuana is mentioned; cocaine use is mentioned.