Review: Mary Ann Rivers is a wonderful writer and the characters in this book
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 07 23, 2014
Mary Ann Rivers is a wonderful writer and the characters in this book, the second in the series, were well-drawn and likable. It's got delicious sexual tension as well. She is very close to being a writer I would automatically buy. There are just a couple things about her writing style that bother me a bit, but it may not be an issue for anyone else. One is that she over-complicates the internal  conflicts to the point that it's a bit too much and a little convoluted. I don't think I've ever had this problem with a romance novel, since too much depth is not usually a problem, but I think she could pull back a bit on that and give more plot and external conflicts. There was never much standing in the way of their romance except their own issues, which were real and compelling but got to seem like they were over-done to sustain them through the book. And she piled them on, not so much heaping too many things so much as examining them in-depth and in excruciating detail, in many different ways over and over. This leads to my second issue, which is way too much interior dialogue, characters dissecting everything that happens when we've already get it. Much of this could have been cut out so there was a better balance of action and dialogue and the more interior writing. This might just be the writer's style and I might still read her, but it felt a bit like an overly rich dessert. Both of these issues are even more present in the first book in this series, "Live," which I did not finish. You want to eat it, you do eat it, but you wish it had been just a little lighter.