Review: Great cover!
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 08 10, 2013
I bought this for the stunning cover. When I began to read, I realized that this was a typical rich-girl-loses-all-her-money plot line (something SEP loves to do), but without SEP's depth of character. Our heroine is fashion-model beautiful, graduated magna cum laude, and is richer than Croesus. Everyone she meets adores her upon first sight. She becomes a minimum-pay waitress with zero trouble and immediately lands a cushy place to stay. She's an Olympic-level skier and champion-level bowler. She also has apparently done nothing at all since college, and by the end of the book determines that to fulfill her life's calling, she will open a boutique and tea shop in a tiny hole-in-the-wall town. When she's told her ex-bestie suffered a horrible medical problem, she doesn't even bother to ask about her health. Our heroine is fleeing from what her thoughts tell us was terrible emotional chaos--that doesn't leave the first scar or regret on her soul, other than she may be wanted by the police. (A question she has every chance to find an answer to, but she doesn't.) The book posits that previously she was "spoilt," but we never see that living the poor, hard-working life poses any problem to her.That's right, she's a blatant Mary Sue. The characters in this book have no depth and repeat their shallow emotional indecision page after page after page. We get an easy ending. It reads like what most people consider a "typical" romance book, all formula with competent if uninspired writing. It's compounded with more than a few editing mistakes (and a few formatting ones). Is this a first book? If so, the writer may very well improve in future endeavors. Best of luck to her. But do keep the cover artist!If you're interested in the same basic premise done with more depth, try Susan Elizabeth Phillip's "Call Me Irresistible," among many others of her books. (The audio version of this in particular is excellent.)