Review: An Unfortunate Start to a Series
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 07 6, 2014
The Rekindling of Love is the first in what appears to be a series of books called The Innkeeper Series. This is the first book I have read by Mr. Knight. I have to be honest and say that I struggled with it quite a bit.We have our main characters,  Dwyer Von Strom and John Fitzgerald from the small town of Glasburg Illinois. The two were secret high school sweethearts who broke up after Prom because of an evil girl and have lived far apart and avoided each other for over a decade. Each thought the other hated him. It seems to be turning into a thing lately to make the reason our heroes are apart the actions of a girl or woman. I hope the trend is short lived.Dwyer has come into a financial downturn which forces him to move back to Glasburg from Chicago to live with his parents. John has been living in Glasburg for a while taking care of his aging parents who are in poor health. So far I think this is a good outline for the beginning of a great book. I love second chance at love stories.In my opinion as a non-author, Mr. Knight just put too much in this book. There were at least a dozen secondary characters. Some of them were couples, and Mr. Knight provided the reader with flashbacks to earlier parts of their relationships. I understand that there is a desire to write future books in the series for these men, and I think the flashbacks would better serve the reader if included in those books. These couples could have just been introduced in The Rekindling of Love only to the extent that their presence impacted John and Dwyer.The writing style felt very clunky. It seemed to be very formally written. Rarely were contractions were used that I noticed. Sometimes facts would be restated over again when a new character entered a scene, even though the reader was privy to the prior conversation and didn't need to have the information repeated. I think a couple of rounds of editing would probably have made this an excellent book and cut out approximately 75 pages.The main characters created by Mr. Knight were very likeable and I was rooting for them. Even the cast of secondary characters were quite likeable. When they get their own stories, I will probably be rooting for them as well. With the characters already established and a promising storyline like the one seen here in The Rekindling of Love, I have every hope that Mr. Knight relaxes his style a bit and writes a much more readable sequel.