Review: Needs Tweaking to Fulfill Its Potential
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 03 20, 2012
**SPOILER ALERT**Given its synopsis and the other reviews, I expected to love "Scrambled Babies" by Babe Hayes. I hate giving bad reviews, but in all honesty, I did not like this book. It had a lot of promise, and there were some entertaining scenes, but it failed to live up to its potential. The general premise of the story was extremely appealing, but the execution didn't measure up.One of the main problems was that there was too much repetition. For example, we would see something happen to the heroine, then the heroine would go over it in her mind three or four times, and then she would tell someone about it, and then she would go over it in her mind another three or four times. It seemed like padding to increase the word count, it slowed down the storyline, and it got boring and annoying. Eventually, I wanted to scream "Enough, already, we get it."The hero and heroine were supposed to be relatively famous, intelligent, successful professional people. Then why were they so stupid as to "reveal all" in taxis and in public places with strangers nearby, when they wanted to keep the switch secret. This is especially puzzling because they both frequently emphasised the need for secrecy and for not letting the media get hold of the story? For example, when the heroine first discovered the switch, it was OMG I have to keep this quiet, ad infinitum, and then she gets in a taxi in LOS  ANGELES with a friend, waits until she is within sight of her hotel, where she would have a modicum of privacy, and then blurts out the ENTIRE story, knowing the taxi driver is avidly listening. Remember, she is in L.A., home of the paparazzi! She and the hero both came across as TSTL. (If this had been a teen slasher flick, they would have been the first two killed when they separated from the others and begged to be whacked with the meat cleaver when they started to make out in the room where every previous occupant had met a grisly end.)When the media revealed the baby switch, there was way too much annoying dithering by both the hero and the heroine. There was so much "OMG, what are we going to do, OMG, what are we going to do", that I wanted to shake them and tell them to grow some brains and backbones. It was not so much screwball comedy as it was Chicken Little running in circles screaming "The sky is falling, the sky is falling." The heroine and hero both seemed to be weak characters. Their total lack of common sense, decisiveness, and assertiveness was too extreme to make them attractive characters. In addition, the heroine was so bitchy and petulant that I wondered why the hero was attracted to her. He was not the greatest prize, but at least he was personable and pleasant. Neither one of them was a compelling, engaging character, and I ended up not even caring what happened to them.On the plus side, the heroine's six years-old daughter was fairly adorable and showed more intelligence and common sense than the heroine. A couple of the secondary characters were well-written and likeable. Also, the hero showed some personal growth when he overcame his distrust of marriage and proposed to the heroine. In addition, the book was free of grammatical and spelling errors.I think this story still has the potential to be a very good book with some tweaking. Obviously some readers like it exactly as it is written, but I think it would appeal to more people if some changes were made.**Edited for spoiler alert**