Review: No Romance and No Comedy
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 07 7, 2014
I kept reading and reading, waiting for the romance OR the humor. I'd have settled for either one, but got neither. Jane, the heroine, is just blah. And she's the better half of the H/h pair. The hero is a pompous, arrogant, self-important jerk, pining for decades over his dead first girlfriend.Jane's character actually moves backward in terms of growth and development. She goes from being a rather weak figure to being downright pathetic when things begin to fall apart.I kept waiting, hoping Gordon would change. I wanted him to have a big moment of self-realization, but he didn't really. Oh, he did finally realize his too-long novel was as self-aggrandizing as everything else about him, but only after Jane, in a moment of drunken honesty, points it out to him. This arrogance is all in spite of the fact that he comes across as a huge loser, being denied tenure at one university, then fired from another, until he ends up bunking on his mousy sister's sofa. Oy, what an annoying character.And shouldn't a romantic comedy have some chemistry? This had none. Oh, sure, they had sex (not described in detail), but it's like it just kind of happened because they were in a hotel room together. Again, blah.The problems I've mentioned don't even begin to address the tense issue. This story shifts from present tense to past, sometimes in the same paragraph. And by present tense, I mean things like, "Jane opens the door. Gordon comes inside and sits down." Obviously that's made up, but it's that type of writing, which comes across as very amateurish and unpolished.I'm sorry, I just don't think I'd recommend this book to anyone. :-(