Review: Fun Story!
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 01 19, 2014
Sparks the Matchmaker is a romance story written by Russell Elkins. What first stood out about this book to me was that the main character is male and it is written by a male author. After going through all the books I’ve read this year I noticed that a majority of them were written by female authors and had female protagonist. Why is that? I don’t know. These days it seems like females dominate the romance genre. That’s why I chose to read this book, I thought it would be a breath of fresh air for me.I liked the concept of the story. It’s about this guy named Ollie who is down on his luck with love. He then meets Sparks, a short spunky guy who has a knack for predicting the future, he promises Ollie to help him meet and fall in love with a girl. For most of the book Ollie was selfish and completely unsure of all his decisions/actions — which was a turn off for me. While I have to say I wasn’t a fan of Ollie’s I was still invested in the story and wanted to see how it all would end up.At times I was confused with the writing style. The book is written in third person, however, every once in a while there would be a few lines written in first person. I’m sure this was meant as a way for the narrator to probe the main character’s thoughts, like you sometimes find in third person novels, but it left me at times utterly confused. In my opinion, it would have flowed more easily without those few lines here and there.This was a very quick read for me; it’s only 239 pages long and can easily be read in one day. Though I did like reading this book, I can’t say that I was head over heals in love with it. I do have to give the author props for taking a unique spin on matchmaking. I’d recommend this for those who like light romance stories.