Book Review + Giveaway!

Great news readers! It’s time for my first giveaway!  I’ll be giving away a copy of the new book

Spent: Memoirs of a Shopping Addict by Avis Cardella.  To enter the contest, you’ll need to subscribe to my blog by RSS (it’s easy – just click the little guy under the twitter image on the right) and come leave a comment that you subscribed.

Now, on to the book review.

I had heard a lot about this book through the newspapers and such and I’ll have to admit, I was intrigued.  I probably fall decidedly outside their targeted demographic (not being female), but I found the book good enough to keep me reading the whole thing.

She starts out the book giving a bit of history as to how far she’s come, then goes into the story telling of her life.  She lived at home with a fashionable mother whose style she seemed to admire.  Early on in the book,  you can see signs of a problem bubbling up.  She talks fondly of memories she had when she was little over a pair of shoes that she was given (or bought, I don’t recall).  I don’t take issue with people liking their clothing, but throughout the book, she has an astounding ability to recall what she wore at specific times or functions over 30 years ago, and how good she felt about herself when she was wearing it.

At the beginning of her clothes buying sprees, she held two jobs and paid for all of her clothing with cash.  Soon, the credit card trap was baited, and she swallowed it hook, line and sinker.  She goes on multiple shopping sprees, buying clothing at times that costs more than I spend in a month.  (As an aside, I’ve never really been keen on the whole “the people in the city don’t live like us here in the smaller towns debate”.  I find it useless and shallow.  That being said, I occasionally felt pangs of those feelings while reading this book.) She finds herself in credit card debt, receiving collection calls and unable to even open the bills.  She meets a very successful guy, and soon is living with him in the Hamptons and heading off to Germany to see his parents.  Although she is embarrassed about her debt situation, she tells the man and he helps her set up a plan so that she can pay it back and be free of it.  The nice thing about this time in her life (for her) is that she can still have the clothes, but someone else pays for them.  Eventually she realizes that something is wrong in her life and relationship, and ends the relationship.

This cycle of credit card debt and another guy continues, although at this point she’s beginning to feel like something in her life needs to change.  After the next guy, she leaves everything that she knows and moves to Paris indefinitely.  I feel like if you’re in as deep as she was, you need a complete break from everything you know to hit the reset button and start moving yourself in the direction that you want to go.  If you don’t know anyone around you, there will be little to distract you from what you want/need to do.    This was kind of a reset for her, and although she was still deep in debt and getting calls constantly, she had started to get her situation under control.  I don’t want to give away the ending, so I’ll stop the review here.

One thing that I thought that was important to discuss was who was really at fault for this?  She rightly notes that no one forced her to sign up for the credit cards, no one forced her into Bergdorf Goodman to buy expensive clothing.  On the other (and far more worrisome) hand, frivolous spending and consumer debt are everywhere, and you have to be rather proactive to avoid falling into the trappings of it.

So, to reiterate: I’ll be giving away 1 copy of this book to anyone who subscribes by RSS and leaves a comment that they have done so.

Tagged as: book review, give away, spent

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