Review: Cute but irrealistic
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 12 4, 2013
I found Margaret a bit too mushy. In addition to her writing romance, she has a bookshop named Happy Ever After where she refuses to sell fictions without happy endings. She sees life through rose-tinted spectacles; she always finds excuses to the selfish behavior of her family (especially the cousin). She’s waiting for her true love, and refuses to consider anything less than the “fairy tale” as she says it herself. It can seem cute at first, but after a while I just wanted to shake her and take off her rose-tinted spectacles.Graham is quite the opposite. He writes science-fiction which ends rarely well, and he doesn’t believe in love since he found his wife in bed with another man. The author avoids the pitfall “my ex was a bitch so all the women are bitches too”, but she used another one: “my first union wasn’t really love so love doesn’t exist”. Not really better. What’s more he tends to accuse first and think later, and above all he has an excessive ego: when he meets a woman in a sexy dress in his building, it’s necessarily because she wants to force her attentions on him. When he meets her again in a bookshop, it’s necessarily because she’s following him everywhere!They are extremely attracted to each other from the beginning, and even if I wondered several times what Margaret saw in Graham at first beside from his physique, seeing his behavior was verging on boorishness, I found the sensual scenes very well written. The evolution of their feelings is well done, we see them struggling between their ideals and their desire, but I found the author repeated a bit too much these preconceptions in the thought of the characters. And I found lovely Graham’s little attentions towards Margaret, and I liked that they understand their own feelings and those of the other by reading the book the other has written since their meeting.The style is light and several moments amused me. If you disregard the characters’ intransigence, or if, as they advise themselves when you read fiction, you accept to suspend disbelief, Love, in writing is a sweet story. Otherwise, it may be better to avoid.