I can see that the author put thought into the idea of this story - it has clever moments and dialogue. However this is also just not my cup of tea. The story never held my attention fully and i think with the right audience this book will do very well.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an arc copy of this book in exchange for a fair and honest review.

I wasn’t sure about this book; whether I liked it or didn’t. It didn’t grab and hold my attention and I found myself just flicking pages till the end.

'Shelf Life' has an interesting concept - a woman's boyfriend leaves her and she details their relationship through the items on the shopping list left on her fridge - but it didn't quite do it for me. While female characters don't necessarily have to be likeable to have their stories told, Ruth never felt fully formed and it seemed difficult to understand why the people in this book were so drawn to her. Her ex-partner is comically shit from the start and all of her friends feel more like caricatures than actual people and it was never fully explained why Ruth hung out with them when she despised them so much.

There are flashes of something more here - there's a scene involving Ruth, her mother and a chicken which will stay with me for a very long time. But it's never fully explained why they're acting in the way they do, or how the actions of one generation and the way they view food is passed down to another.

Livia Franchini is an extremely talented writer. 'Shelf Life' just didn't hit the mark. Next time.

I'm conflicted with how to review this book. I absorbed it over the course of a few hours and felt invested in Ruth and her story however, I'm not sure I liked it. Interesting and thoughtfully written, yes but it seems that it was missing something. Or perhaps that is the point, that life and the journey it takes us on can be difficult and sometimes bland but also connect us to those around us as at the end of it all, we're all ordinary people.

An interesting and original concept... but this book did not do it for me at all. I was bored. I wasn’t invested. I just wasn’t interested.

I don’t know if I have read a book lately with a blurb this accurate that nonetheless completely failed to give an indication what the book will be like. On the surface it’s correct; yes Ruth has just been left by her boyfriend of ten years and has to navigate her life and yes the story is told by way of the shopping list he left behind – but it also something else entirely. Told in varies formats (stream-of-consciousness in the present, a series of text messages in the past, mixing more straight forward narrations with vague ones) and from different perspectives (mainly Ruth’s perspective in first person, but also parts narrated from Neil’s perspectives, parts in second person, parts in first person plural), this book is a portrait of a woman who was very much broken before she met the awful man and became more so during the course of a fairly horrible relationship.

When the book worked, it really worked for me – but there were just so many parts I could not properly get on board with, starting with the endless accounts of weird dreams Ruth and Neil had. I am unsure I grasped what the narrative purpose of those were and I found them relentlessly boring and confusing. While I appreciated the mixed-media approach, I didn’t love reading text messages that just never ended.

I really liked the framing of the story and I thought Franchini did something very clever: in the first chapter, when Neil breaks up with Ruth I couldn’t help but think that was the right choice because she seemed fairly awful. And then Franchini goes back and recontextualizes the scene in a way that made my heart hurt. Neil is, for all intents and purposes, really really awful. He is not only a cheater but also a stalker, he made Ruth into the person he wanted her to be and then punishes her for it, and his thoughts on women are unkind and horrifying (at some point he says this about his girlfriend of ten years: “The fact of her aging makes me uneasy.”). While I found his characterization believable and him endlessly fascinating, spending time in his head was very much not fun. Ruth on the other hand was just the kind of difficult to root for woman I adore in my fiction. Overall, I found this book impeccably structured and impressively constructed – but often difficult to stick with due to its deliberate darkness.

Content warning: stalking, grooming, eating disorders, disordered eating, cheating, emotional abuse, bullying, assault, sexual harrassment

Sadly I didn't really care for this book at all. A very original concept but it didn't work for me, sorry.

A break up told in form of a shopping list.
A very original idea and a clever way of telling the tales of the characters.
The writing flows and the characters are well illustrated.
Brings together humour and also a sense of sadness when the characters become more known to you.
This was easy reading until the last quarter of the book, where I just felt it lost the thread and therefore you lost where it was up to.
The ending also seemed very abrupt leaving you with lots of questions that were not answered.
Thanks you to NetGalley and the publisher for allowing me to read in return for a review.

o who was Ruth? I don’t think Ruth really knew who she was and it was interesting to see how Franchini would help Ruth and indeed ourselves find out.

Ruth was obviously upset at the break up of her ten year relationship, but it gave her questions she needed to answer, predominately how do you find out who you are as an individual after sharing your life for so long.

You got the feeling that she did everything that Neil her ex wanted to do, as she pampered to his every wimp and each need. It made you wonder if this was the reason Neil left, did he want her to be someone else or had she outlived her usefulness or shelf life.

Franchini gave us glimpses into his own mind interspersing chapters with his own thoughts which certainly didn’t make you like or respect him.

Ruth, for me, was complex, lacked confidence, self worth, never knew where she fitted in. We didn’t get to hear much about her family life but you guessed that it wasn’t necessarily good, no positive role model to guide her in life. I liked the way Franchini flipped between her past and present, the acquaintances that reappeared that she had to reevaluate, to see if their friendship was real or fake.

Her role in a nursing home seemed to be the only place where she felt comfortable, safe within the confines of rules and procedures.

Franchini’s structure was interesting, her use of chat room narrative, of emails broke up the narrative, gave the novel a more personal feel. The shopping list headings were unusual and unique, and set the novel apart from the usual stories of individuals finding out who they were.

Ruth’s journey of self discovery was at times quite torturess to read and your heart went out to her, her actions, her thoughts those of a lost woman. I found the latter parts quite ambiguous, a lot of reading between the lines and assumptions as Ruth’s friends reflected on their own thoughts of her leaving me with more questions than answers.

It was an unusual novel which made it that much more interesting and fascinating and hard to belief this was a debut.

This was an awful book.

I thought that the premise sounded intriguing but I honestly am so disappointed.

Gave this one a go but after a couple of hours I was completely confused.
Don’t think I’m smart enough for this one!

30-year old Ruth breaks up with her fiancee she is devastated. H er story is told through the the shopping list that is left when the pair split. This book has provoked very diverse reviews. Some reviewers love it, some don't, I'm afraid I'm in the latter category. I really didn't engage with the characters and ultimately didn't care about the outcome. It's not a bod book, it just didn't resonate with me.

I thought the format of this book was quite interesting. Ruth just breaks up with her boyfriend and tells the story of her life through a shopping list.
I just felt sorry for her and it just bugs me a little bit that we have lots of books about women who are bullied by their partners. I feel like reading the same story over and over again.
It was an OK read, nothing . blowing my mind off, and it wasn't bad either.
If you like the subject. you may give it a go.

Thanks a lot to NetGalley and the publisher for this copy in exchange for an honest review.

When 30-year old Ruth breaks up with her fiancee she is devastated. H er story is told through the the shopping list that is left when the pair split. This book has provoked very diverse reviews. Some reviewers love it, some don't, I'm afraid I'm in the latter category. I really didn't engage with the characters and ultimately didn't care about the outcome. It's not a bod book, it just didn't resonate with me.

Sadly this book did not live up to everything it promised in the synopsis. It was disjointed and confusing in places and the more I read the more disinterested I became. Sorry.

Thank you to Netgalley for my copy.

I really couldn't get into this book - I felt that the story was too far fetched and the characters bland. I didn't feel invested in Ruth's life and got to the end without really feeling that I had read a full story.

Sadly this book was not for me. I just couldn’t connect to it and I found the plot a bit weak.
It did confuse me slightly.
Thank you to both NetGalley and Doubleday books for gifting me this book

This is a beautifully written book about a woman reeling from the break up a ten year relationship, reflected on through a shopping list, the only thing her ex left behind.

I enjoyed parts of it, and found the ending really satisfying, but it did take a while to get fully immersed in the story, and subsequently, care about the characters. Some bits were confusing. Overall, very promising author, even though it missed the mark for me.

When Ruth’s partner, Neil, leaves her after 10 years together, she finds it hard to keep going.

I wanted to enjoy this book, as I’d heard good reviews of it, but somehow it didn’t happen. There were too many segments I didn’t understand - especially the ‘meal’ with her mother. What was the point, other than a complete waste of chicken? The story flipped between different characters, different timeframes, and various dreams, all of which added together to make a confused storyline. I couldn’t keep up with who was doing what, and what was happening now and what was in the past,

I also wasn’t convinced by the use of a shopping list as chapter headings. Again, the relevance at times was questionable.

Sorry, just not a book I want to read again.

I was really excited about this book. It had a brilliant premise: a thirty-year-old woman, reeling from the sudden end of her decade-long relationship, finds a recent shopping list, with each item conjuring disparate memories of her ex-fiance and her youth. An innovative and imaginative exploration of identity, memory and power from a young and impassioned female voice.

And yet the story itself really didn't live up to my expectations. I personally found it a little dull, and couldn't help but feel that the characters were lacking. Considering the novel centred around such an affecting scenario, and crafted a protagonist with issues and idiosyncrasies which should have been genuinely heartbreaking, the text was ultimately, bizarrely unmoving. I felt no connection, and very little engagement or immersion. I pushed myself to finish it, but everything just seemed to sort of... fizzle out.

I appreciate the creativity, courage and hard work which has clearly gone in to this work, but it simply was not for me.