Review: Great premise, just not feeling it
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 05 31, 2014
I went ahead and purchased the second book because they were both on sale.  The premise of the first book is that Charity's father is a world class doctor.  Charity also attended medical school and was at the top of her class until she got a phone call from her Mom asking her to come home.  Charity's mom was dying of cancer and Charity was the one who bathed her, cleaned her and took care of her while her father was at the hospital.  She quit medicine and instead became a very successful professional fundraiser to help hospitals deal with the loss of funds from insurance payments and giving from regular donors.Charity has just landed at her new job at Atlanta, a two year contract to help them modernize and compete with better funded hospitals.  She get a call from her Dad and calls back to hear a voice with an accent introduce himself as Elijah and then her father calls her back to say he is stepping down from the everyday Chief of Staff to work on research and since the hospital bears his name and his 65th birthday is coming up, he wants to plan his party as a fundraiser for the oncology wing.  She volunteers her services and offers to do it for expenses.  This cuts her time to have a personal life, but the idea of trying to make some kind of peace with her father is important to moving on with her life.  Elijah turns out to be a Kiwi version of her Dad who is a major Man-whore (all the nurses seem to know about his body ink from personal experience).  One stalker nurse amuses Charity so much, she pretends to be his new one night stand.Now as the second Saving Forever (the hospital in Atlanta) starts, we learn Elijah is just as much a workaholic as her Dad.  He surprises her at her first big fundraiser in Atlanta, but receives a phone call to tell him his father died.  He asks and for some reason she goes to New Zealand with him, a man she barely knows and has no official relationship status.  He has an unresolved relationship with his Mom and a funeral is not the time to walk into a shaky family dynamic.  She does not know anyone, he does not spend any time with her or show her anything of the scenery nearby and when she tries to help, his mother treats her like the help and they both get mad at her.  His mother tells her a car will be ready to take her back to the airport and she does not hear from him.  Somehow she take this self-centered, workaholic, commitment phobic user of casual sex as a stress buster back.  She has already performed complex surgeries and she is amazed that he did a tracheotomy in the hallway.  It is a very easy lifesaving measure that can be done with a ballpoint pen and a straw if you are desperate and have some emergency medical training and would be second nature to a chief of surgery at a cutting edge hospital.  A little more medical research is the least this author could have done.  At one point, the story says she was a third year medical student who did surgery.  At another it talked about her residency.  Charity might have observed a surgery, but would not have done one as a third year.  She would have started doing procedures at her internship supervised by residents and would have done rotations in major areas to determine what specialty she would pursue as a residency.There is a hashing it out scene where her Dad explains he was trying to find a way to save her Mom, but he was never there and it was clear that even when he knew he was going to fail, he was not there because he did not want to see his wife die when what his wife most wanted was to spend what time she had with him.  Charity is a competent, independent woman with a big heart and she deserves better than this father and this man.  I just wish she would see it.This review may sound judgemental, but I do not believe in adultery...get a divorce.  I believe in second chances, but first that person has to grow up and learn to change the behavior that blew their relationship out of the water to begin with.  Most of all that person has to be sorry and willing to change not just to get what they want, but because it is the right thing to do regardless of the outcome to this relationship.  If you do not have these elements, you cannot keep a relationship by forgiving constantly.