The title should have stopped at Mad Women, because they were all just that: mad. Mad at each other, the consequences of their actions, and of course, they were all some degree of crazy. I didn't see the In Love part, it was more likely desperation. The least broken of all of the women is the one who is most misunderstood. She quits eating meat, studies Buddhism and saves abandoned cats instead of being overcome by guilt for wanting to be her own person.

I can't say this book had much reality in it for me, except the part about saving the cats. It was just too full and too difficult to get to know the main characters because too many similar weird and bad things happened to the same four women. I missed the initial character development by not having read Crazy Ladies first. The ease and flexibility of the reader's voice helped fill in some of this gap for me. Something that is very important in a recording with so much going on and similar situations written around and overlapping scenarios is that each character must have a face. I may not have appreciated the accent for this book, but the reader's voice was very pleasant and multi-textured, giving each character that piece of individualism required, keeping the storylines straight and making them people.