Review: "Point, Click, Love" by Molly Shapiro

Best friends Katie, Annie, Maxine, and Claudia are familiar with love and relationships, but they are not quite as familiar with how the Internet has a way of turning everything that you once knew on its head. Newly divorced and mother of two Katie is done with marriage- or so she thinks. She turns to the world of online dating seeking a partner willing to fulfill her sexual needs without the baggage that comes along with it. Annie always imagined that she would end up living in New York but finds herself far away from the big city with a huge house to call her own but nobody to fill it. Longing for a baby she turns to sperm donation sites online in order to try to fulfill her dreams of motherhood. Claudia, frustrated with the fact that her unemployed husband would rather update his Facebook status than cook dinner or help with their children, begins to seek companionship elsewhere. Maxine, with the seemingly perfect husband and children, wonders why her husband doesn't want to have sex with her anymore and turns to the stories found on celebrity gossip sites for solace.

These four woman find out how the Internet can complicate our already messy lives with just the click of a button, and they will strive to find some kind of balance among it all.

My first thought about this book was how timely the topic is. I met my husband just as online dating began to gain popularity and although I met him because we were set up on a blind date by a mutual friend, now I would hazard a guess that more people meet online than in bars. It's not just online dating though, the Internet has taken over the world! People who go out for dinner spend more time communicating on their phones with other people than actually talking to those in front of them. Don't know what to have for dinner? Google it! People are connecting with distant family members through Facebook and with Twitter you can know exactly what your pals are up to at any given time. I'm not complaining. I've found that being able to connect with like-minded individuals online (hello book bloggers and authors!) has been wonderful. My husband works shift work so when I'm lonely in the evenings after the kids have gone to bed it's great to be able to pop online and check to see how everyone's doing. It does change things, though. People are communicating face to face far less than they used to and it has changed the way that we do everything, from communicating to searching for jobs to cooking to dating. Point, Click, Love takes this idea that the Internet has changed everything around us and it explores how things would change for one particular group of friends.

I did have one small complaint about the book, though. It is fairly short (about 200 pages on my eReader) and I felt that I didn't get enough time to get to know each of the individual characters very well. Point, Click, Love tells the stories of four different women and since they essentially get about 50 pages of storyline each, it took me a bit to get to know which one was which, and it did leave me wanting a bit more from each of them when I reached the end of the book.

The ending was fantastic, though. Each individual story wraps up and the endings are not at all what I imagined that they would be at the beginning. Since I read a lot of chick lit with fairly predictable endings it made for a nice surprise.

Point, Click, Love is a reflection on love, marriage, infidelity and dating in a digital age. This timely tale will leave you reflecting on how things have changed in the past ten years and how they will continue to change in the next ten. My thanks to the author for providing me with a review copy of this book.