Review: This is a first novel?
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 10 24, 2013
Advertising employee Lila doesn't particularly like her job, but losing it and getting dumped by her boyfriend shatters her self-image and leads to reinventing herself in a lovely northern California coast town. And running into the heir apparent to the local vineyard at the worst possible times.This absolutely does not read like a first novel, and I am not surprised it won a RWA award. There are NONE of the typical beginning author mistakes: slow start, overexplaining, telling instead of showing. Instead, I found a plot that took off from page 1, characters that simply leapt off the page at me, and a thoroughly enjoyable story. I'm not sure why Westlake calls it a romantic comedy, there isn't anything laugh-out-loud humorous in it; I would simply call it a romance. But the characters are so strong that even when I realized it was just a romance, a genre I generally avoid, I was too interested to quit. The plot is somewhat predictable, not really a drawback in this genre, and easy to forgive when the story is well-handled. The weak ending offered a fizzle rather than a bang, but again easy to forgive; endings are hard to write, and some of the most-enjoyed authors around rarely managed more than a fizzle. The title is okay but uninspired and not really relevant to the story, and the cover was definitely amateur. Astoundingly, spelling, grammar, and formatting were nearly flawless. She used "flare" when she meant "flair" and "grizzly" instead of "grisly," but I'm used to seeing more mistakes than that on the first page! This is not great literature, although it would be a perfect vacation read, and the most I can give it is 4 stars; I reserve 5 stars for extraordinarily compelling and unforgettable tales. But 4 stars from me means a solid, enjoyable story with no major drawbacks, and you can buy this confidently.