Note: I received this book from Thomas Nelson for free for the purpose of reviewing it (see here). However, I am still going to be completely honest! I guess it's good the first book they sent me was, in my opinion average.

Rick and Bubba's Guide to the Almost Nearly Perfect Marriage is a book about two American Christian Radio personalities (I've never heard of them being from Australia) who are writing about their Marriages and essentially how much they aren't perfect. The book basically lists of a range of different experiences a couple will go through when they are married, and gives some tips on what to and not to do.

First up, I only finished reading this book because I had to review it. Generally I found it to be very much the same from page to page. I think there are much better books out there which deal much better with what the bible says about marriage and gives better tips etc. Having said that however, the book is littered with humour (albeit that kinda occasionally funny American humour that no one else gets), and the chapters are short and easy to read. So perhaps if my friend wasn't into reading I might consider this to be a good entry level book for them to read on the subject of marriage.

As you can tell by the title, the book is trying to be realistic. Sometimes however, I felt that the book was a bit to blase about how our sin can cause us to be poor partners, and I felt sometimes it just accepted the fact that humans are bad at being married. I understand that sometimes this was for the sake of humour, but I felt like sometimes it was inappropriate.

There was however some really great stuff in this book, that was presented in a simple way. these are few and far between at the beginning of the book in chapters like, Things like "Three sides to Every Story" (p45), and "Why couples fight" (p51) giving good insights into the underlying reasons behind fights. However, the last 6 chapters made for quite good reading. Here they outline how marriage is built on respect and love (although I take issue with their exegesis of Eph 5 where they seem to overlook the whole submit thing and jump right to respect) and tell a very moving personal story about how life can throw some curve balls at you and you really find out what it means to love each other in hard times.

The book is easy to read, it could probably be read and understood by reading the chapter heading and the first paragraph of each chapter, it never goes any deeper than that. There is some good stuff in it, but a lot of stuff has to be waded through to get to it. The book is sometimes amusing and would be good for someone who is not used to reading. 2.5/5


Here is a YouTube video where they massively oversell this book:



And here is a bit of a preview of the book.





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