Mom Jeans and Other Mistakes by Alexa Martin

Mom Jeans and Other Mistakes is an exceedingly average chick-lit novel. While I appreciated that it was very much a novel about friendship, as opposed to romance, and that the author does incorporate more serious issues within her otherwise light-hearted story, I found many scenes to be cringey (unintentionally so) and towards the end, things take a soap-opera turn.
This book follows best friends Jude and Lauren. Jude is an influencer who is all about pilates and clean eating. Jude’s mother is a narcissistic former reality-tv star who habitually guilt trips Jude into giving her money and taking part in publicity stunts she’s not keen on doing.

Lauren, who wanted to be a surgeon, works at and has a 5-year-old daughter. After splitting with the father she’s more or less had to raise her daughter on her own. When her ex starts acting like more of a parent, Lauren is initially happy for her daughter. Things change when he decides to file for custody.
Due to their finances, these two bffs decide to move in together, eventually starting a podcast on motherhood.
For the most part, the tone of this novel is cheesy/silly. Our leads have their troubles but the drama affecting their lives never struck me as heavy-going (even when it should have been). Lauren has to deal with her ex trying to get full custody of her daughter, while Jude is trying her hardest to pretend that everything is hunky-dory and that her mother isn’t toxic af.
It just so happens that I found their jargon, hobbies, and interests to be…low-key annoying. We have an overuse of the word mansplaining and feminism as well as a lot of scenes going on about the ‘mommy’ life or wine dates or exercise classes. I just felt wholly disconnected from Jude and Lauren. They were meant to be 28 but boy they could have been in their late thirties and I would have believed it. This novel is very much intended for an American millennial audience, not moi. Scenes that were meant to be cute were in fact cringe. Alexa Martin doesn’t offer any new insights into the realities of being an influencer nor do her mother-daughter relationship feel particularly complex. The ‘mommy culture’ also just…nope. I do not care for it one bit (i also hated reading about it in Such a Fun Age and Big Little Lies).

Anyway, while I did find much of the story to be somewhat grating (tone-wise), it still managed to be now and again mildly entertaining…and then we near the end and the melodrama commences. I found the author’s portrayal of alcoholism to be surface-level. And it annoyed me that because Jude likes to party and isn’t as straight-laced as Lauren she has to be ‘punished’. I swear that last plot point would have been more suited to a soap-opera. Here it just left a bad taste in my mouth. The author just throws this in and goes over it quite superficially so that things are more or less resolved within a couple of pages. There was something moralistic about this last portion of the story that didn’t sit right with me (not that things like this ever happen…but really? it just had to happen in this story?).
My overall verdict is ‘meh’. I liked the focus on friendship and that the story highlights how the American healthcare system treats Black mothers and just how insidious toxic relationships are. However, as I said above, its attempts at pandering to a millennial audience resulted in some very cringey scenes and the author treats serious issues, such as alcoholism, in a theatrical way. I guess if you are a fan of authors such as Emily Henry you might find this novel more enjoyable than I did.

my rating: ★★★☆☆

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