This review contains spoilers for See Jane Snap. Please read with caution if you have not completed the novel.
To the watching eye, Jane Osborne is living the perfect life with the perfect husband -- under the surface, she has discovered that her surgeon husband of eighteen years has been cheating on her the entire time, and with a man. Jane is trying to hold it together through self-help mantras and audios in the car, but everything must come to an end as she meets her breaking point in a most unexpected place: the grocery store parking lot.
Under the impression that she has taken one of her friend's Zoloft pills, she becomes increasingly agitated by a woman who has too many items in the 15-or-less line and leaves her grocery cart in the middle of the parking lot. Jane, who simply cannot take anything else, snaps and starts to hurl oranges at this woman's car and causes quite the disturbance, especially when it is revealed that she did not take Zoloft, but ecstasy. Resulting in her arrest but no charges, Jane agrees to take a first time offender class to make sure this event stays from away from her permanent record.
You can't help but feel for Jane -- she has discovered the life that she has been living for nearly two decades is nothing but a charade for her husband, Dan. She does everything she can so that Dan's cardiology department stays afloat at the hospital, and appeases the donors he desperately needs to impress for a $25 million naming rights donation.
Dan is probably one of the worst fictional husbands I have ever read about, nearly up there with Nick Dunne from Gone Girl. He is constantly angry at Jane for anything she does that is out of place -- she follows his car and finds him with another man and also misses a conference call regarding the fundraiser where his potential donors will be. Dan is basically absent from Jane and their daughter, Avery, lives and acts shocked when there could be a possibly of Jane spilling his secret. He continues to be an absolute jerk throughout the entire book until the very end, where he somewhat redeems himself at the fundraiser gala.
The group of women that Jane meets and forms friendships with at her required course are the first people that she is able to open up to, and it leads to her journey of healing and no longer settling for a life that is not what she expected. She quickly forms close bonds with them, despite initially wanting to only go to and from the course in order to get it over with, and avoid talking to any of the women outside of the course.
Jane's "snap" was short-lived, and in my opinion, not very "public" as the synopsis described. I was expecting a lot more feminine rage coming from her, but the plot felt as though it was mostly Jane jumping from one moment in time to the next, leaving a lot of unanswered questions in her journey. Her inner monologue definitely gives some good insight on her emotions and thought processes as she comes to terms with what she did in that parking lot and what she knows about her husband. Jane's relationship with her younger sister Julie does have some hardships, but they try to make the best of it as they work together to care for their ailing mother.
I was so incredibly glad when Jane yelled at Dan towards the end of the book -- she has been living, for the past two months, with a constant loop of what she knows and has seen Dan cheating on her, and for him to call her out with Officer Chavez and say that he was "never caught" with the men he was seeing but she cannot see Chavez is an insane double standard. She was in the right with asking him to move to that other portion of the house and have him talk to their daughter, especially because Avery knew he was cheating on Jane, she just did not know who he was doing it with.
I'm glad that in the end Jane is doing well for herself and on the road to healing, I just wish we were able to see more of her snap or even see it go in a different direction, rather than it just be her and that woman in the parking lot. This premise had a lot of potential and it personally felt as though it fell a little flat -- you can tell the author wanted to be funny in some parts and more serious in others, but the comedy fell short in the long run. It is fast-paced and an easy read, and I am happy to finally have read it, since it has been on my shelf for so long.
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