This book is excellent for women of a certain age. It humorously deals with all the trials that we have to deal with on a daily basis. Great fun and well written

A great read with a story that can be aligned with real life! Definitely worth a read!

A pin sharp, hilarious and intelligent look at a woman in mid life, but not crisis. Painfully honest, you'll find yourself rooting for Kate all over again.

Loved the first book and really pleased to read the follow up. Shows that life continues to be hard as you juggle everything. You are told things get easier as you get older but they just get different with different challenges.

Kate still has to contend with the pull of family against work while keeping everything and everyone afloat.

Allison has captured what so many feel but can't always articulate. Great follow up book.

Absolutely hilarious! A must read for every fifty something woman. Alison shares it all..... could identify with so many episodes. Simply brilliant

Brilliant. I'm sure every 40+ woman can identify with Kate, whether a mother or not. How she juggles house renovation, a dull marriage with a born again husband, teenage children , sick elderly relatives, the menopause and a high powered job is remarkable and so true to life. - should be on every book club list!

I have not read "I don't know how she does it" but this sequel by Allison Pearson can be read as a stand-alone novel. I found it possible to empathise with Kate despite not having had a high-flying career in the City or children myself! The characters are real individuals with believable Interactions and the family dynamics are well drawn. The way that the whole social media minefield is described also seems realistic and up to date. Definitely a worthwhile read and to be recommended.

What a thoughtfully written book total captures the life of a woman in her middle age when the children are becoming adults and the parents need support. This book shows trials and tribulations Kate goes through being a woman of that age dealing with every issue you can think of. This book was a breath of fresh air totally believable brilliant read

Kate Reddy is totally a hero for all of us middle aged women who think we're all passed it. Had me laughing out loud and reminiscing the teenage years with my sons (we all thankfully survived). The first book I have read that doesn't pussyfoot around the peri menopause. I still 'don't know how she does it' but I'm in love with nearly all the characters in this book (not rich he's an arse). Absolutely brilliant

I absolutely love a book to which I can relate and this one has it in spades! I am 49 and totally get Kate and where she’s coming from. Peri menopausal symptoms, teenage angst and finding yourself after years of giving are all within this book. A must read for any woman over 40! Definitely reading: I don’t know how she does it, now!

Kate Reddy is approaching 50 and is stuck in the middle of adolescent children and ageing parents. I hadn't read her first book but thoroughly enjoyed this one. As someone a decade older I can look back and laugh! Her children drive her mad at times and her husband is a bit of a disaster, most women would not have her patience. This is an easy read and will certainly make you laugh,, or maybe not if you are approaching 50!

Perfectly illustrates the life of the sandwich generation - or the stretched middle. With some very funny bits.

I really loved this follow-on book, the first one ‘I don’t know how she does it’ was hilarious. There has been quite a gap between books, around 10 years but it was well worth the wait ! More laughs and excellent writing. I give this 9/10.

Teenage kids, ageing parents, a next-to-useless husband, menopausal woes – Kate Reddy has them all. And now she needs to get back into working life – a decade after leaving her stressful job as the manager of a hedge fund. No easy feat when you’re approaching 50. This is the sequel to the bestselling I Don’t Know How She Does It, but works just as well as a stand-alone novel. A brilliant read, it’s laugh-out-loud-funny in its depiction of the trials and tribulations of the sandwich generation.

I really enjoyed this book. I laughed a lot. I felt an empathy with Kate and her life straight away. Allison Pearson is spot on about being nearly 50 and how you feel about life. This is a really good page turner about life and family and the laughter and tears through life. I found myself laughing out loud on several occasions. It is a look at life which deals with some heavy topics head on while still managing to make you laugh.

Sorry, didn't find this at all funny - and without laughs the heroine just comes over as whiny. Humour is always very hit and miss - more so than suspense or horror - and it's probably my sense of what is or isn't funny that's at fault here. For this reason I shan't be posting a review on line. Also, as I've stopped reading a quarter of the way through, I wouldn't have given a star rating if Netgalley hadn't insisted.

OMG I loved Kate Reddy the first time around but this time she really has become my absolute idol! I adored I Don’t Known How She Does It (NOT THE FILM! STAY WELL AWAY FROM THAT ONE!) and that iconic scene with the mince pies has always stayed with me. I can verify from personal experience that it was a very realistic reflection of the busy working mum. I once spent 6 months avoiding recipe requests for the “best brownies anyone had ever tasted” when I made them for the girls school Christmas Fair one year, unable to admit I had used a box mix from Costco! I think Kate spoke for a generation of stressed out mothers who were trying to prove that they could be all things to all people as an antithesis to that singleton life promoted by the Bridget Jones brigade. So I was delighted to see that Kate was coming back as an older, menopausal version of herself, her validity reflecting back at me as I also enter that particular phase of my own life, although Kate has yet to become a grandmother like me! Maybe there’s another book there for the future in fifteen years time!

Allison Pearson was able to bring out many conflicting emotions in me throughout How Hard Can It Be. I was mostly belly laughing out loud but just as quickly I would feel like bursting into tears with the poignant observations of a woman struggling to balance being one of the “sandwich generation”. Caring for elderly parents from both sides of the family whilst still having children is now much more common than it used to be and women are facing a pressure that can build up to a possible breakdown at a time when, once again, they have to be all things to all people. And they have to do this whilst facing the biological changes and stresses that come with middle age as they approach menopause. As Kate Reddy was born in the same year as me, I was able to relate to her character with much affection and understanding. I empathised completely with her life choices and the situations she found herself in whilst finding myself mentally cheering her along to the happy ending she deserved! And having tried to find employment recently myself at the grand old age of 52, I am used to being an “over qualified” candidate! Over qualified or “over the hill”?!

There were some very relevant observations here, revealed with an indulgent humour that captivates the reader from the very first page. I worshipped at the alter of the fabulous Kate before and I did so again here. I plan to re-read this one again in the near future as I loved it that much! It has shot straight onto my favourite books of 2017 so comes highly recommended by me!

Some women of fifty may go through a stage in life where they just can't articulate themselves as they used to. This can be put down to what we call 'menopausal fog' which makes us walk into a room then completely forget why. Words desert us, as we desperately grasp for the vocabulary which we once had, and know is still there hidden deep within our frazzled brains.

So, it's very refreshing to read about a woman approaching fifty who can articulate exactly how she feels, exquisitely and with laugh out loud humour..

Kate Reddy is fast approaching the big '5 0' , she is married to Rich. who is going through his own mid life crisis and has two teenage children. Her  son  hardly  ever looks up from his phone, and her daughter finds herself in a position where a particular body part is displayed to the World via Facebook

I loved how she referred to her brain as 'Roy' the dithery librarian who desperately hunts out information for her in a vast room of knowledge. Sometimes she will ask Roy the name of an acquaintance only to be told where she has left her glasses.

A cleverly written book which portrays the horror of the menopause, the hardships of returning to work as a forty-nine-year-old, and having to care for elderly parents who are becoming increasingly frail. However, the humour throughout this book makes it into a highly enjoyable, hilarious read.

The characters are so well portrayed that they could belong to members of your own family and Kate is purely adorable.

A book for all women because the subject matter is so often shunned and needs to be talked about more openly, and because we all need a really good laugh now and again.

The book was kindly sent me by NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I was sent How Hard Can It Be? by Allison Pearson to read and review by NetGalley.
This Novel made me laugh out loud! It may be that it’s because I am a woman of a certain age and that I can identify with many of the issues the protagonist has to cope with, but I don’t think it is just because of that. The novel is well written and engaging. The main theme of the story centres around Kate Reddy, mother of adolescent children, whose husband has decided to give up his job and retrain as a counsellor. With her husband no longer earning Kate needs to get back out into the workplace herself to support her family, this would be a challenge in itself but she is also approaching 50 and perimenopausal.
I suppose it was inevitable that the further you got into the story, when Kate’s life becomes more sorted, there are fewer laughs, but despite this I would still have given the book 5 stars were it not for the fact I felt the ending was rather too rapidly and neatly wrapped up. Don’t let this put you off though, it is still a great entertaining and uplifting read.

I was very keen to read this book and really wanted to love it but, sadly, I was a little disappointed. It was a very well-written book, but there was none of the wit and humour that had featured in “I Don’t Know How She Does It”. Everything was resolved by the end of the book, and it did feature threads of real life, but I would’ve liked it to be a bit more light-hearted. However, I would still recommend the book as there will be plenty of people who will love it and I’m sure it will be a bestseller.

Thank you to NetGalley and HarperCollins for an ARC in return for a fair and honest review.