Review | No-One Ever Has Sex In The Suburbs by Tracy Bloom

No-One Ever Has Sex In The Suburbs by Tracy Bloom
Series: No-One Ever Has Sex On A Tuesday #2
Published On: June 23, 2015
Published By: Lawsome Books
Genre: Chick Lit
Pages: 337
Format: eBook
Source: Bought
Rating: ★★½

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Ben and Katy haven't had sex since Ben found out about her one-night stand with her childhood sweetheart, Matthew. 
Not only that but the arrival of a new-born baby has blown their relationship apart like a hand grenade. 
Drastic measures are required, so they swap roles hoping that everyone will be happier... Only it’s not as easy as they thought. When a desperate Ben starts secretly accepting help to solve his childcare disasters – from Matthew’s wife – it could mean the end of everything. Can their relationship survive the lies and suspicions and will they ever have sex again?

No-One Ever Has Sex In The Suburbs is the sequel to a book I really enjoyed back in 2015, No-One Ever Has Sex On A Tuesday. I thought the first book was a lot of fun so when I discovered that there was a sequel I was excited to dive back into the lives of Katy, Ben, Matthew, Alison and all of their friends. I really hate to say it but this was such a disappointment for me. I was expecting it to be just as good as the first book and it really didn't live up to that standard at all.

After reading my review of the first book, this second book just seemed to be the complete opposite from everything I love in the first book. The only thing I did like in both books was that they were both fast-paced and the humour was still there in the second book. The plot did keep moving along quickly so although I wasn't necessarily enjoying it, I wasn't getting bored as things kept happening. The plot was a bit predictable though, nothing that happened surprised me at all. As I mentioned, this book did have the same humour as the first and I found myself trying not to laugh out loud in public a few times, though not as much as I had expected.

My favourite thing about the first book was the characters and I couldn't wait to be re-introduced to them. However, having children seemed to drastically change these people as I ended up hating almost all of the characters. I just couldn't stand they way they were behaving for the majority of the book. I thought Ben, who was one of my favourite characters, was incredibly immature. Alison annoyed me more than I can even put into words, I wanted to hit her at various points, and I'm not a violent person. And then we had Katy and Matthew, who were just boring and didn't really do much or bring a lot to the book at all. I still loved Daniel though, he had me cracking up and kept me sane while the other characters made me want to tear my hair out.

It really annoyed me while reading this that all of the big problems or issues seemed so trivial. I'm getting to tired of reading about characters that could solve all of their issues by having a decent conversation with their partner, and that was a major theme of this story. I'm not sure if I just don't fully understand the position these characters are in, having not yet had a baby or had to learn how to parent my child. Maybe I'm just not the right person to be reading this. As well as easily solved problems, a lot of the problems seemed very unrealistic to me. The main focus of the story is Ben struggling with being a first time father and being pretty clueless. As far as I am aware, every first time parent has those times where they feel like they don't know what they're doing and that's a pretty common knowledge thing. However, it was as though Ben was the only parent in the world to ever feel clueless. It just seemed stupid.

My other main problems with this book was that the relationships seemed unhealthy to me. I'm no expert on relationships but I often found myself thinking 'surely this isn't healthy in a relationship' multiple times while reading this. Surely it's not normal to just not talk to your partner about problems you have or how you're feeling? That was portrayed as completely normal in this book. I also couldn't understand why Ben felt the need to prove his ability as a father to such an extent. I can appreciate that he wanted to show Katy he could do it, but surely the first person you would go to with a parenting problem would be the other parent of the child? Again, this could be just because I don't have children yet and don't fully understand. Also Alison not letting Matthew parent his own children in any way seemed very odd to me! I couldn't get past that at all.

Overall, this book was sadly just a disappointment. Like I said, I'm not sure if I just didn't fully grasp the story due to having not yet had the experience of being a first time parent. I'm possibly not the right person to be reading this book, but from my inexperienced point of view I just found it to be quite problematic. To me, this was a case of a really good book that did not need to be ruined by an unnecessary sequel. I do still enjoy Tracy Bloom's writing and her humour so I will be picking up her other books at some point.