Review: Presentation may have been lacking, but content was fantastic.
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 03 30, 2012
Lucy V. Morgan, <strong>Beautiful Mess</strong> (No publisher given, 2011)First off: okay, self-publishers, I've had it. I'm going to start taking pieces of stars off when you don't supply complete information with your releases. I mention this here (since this is one of, oh, ten or fifteen I'll be reviewing in this batch that qualify) because it's my favorite of the Kindle shorts I've read this month, and thus points off are going to be most notable here. When a review goes from one star to half a star, who's gonna notice? When you drop from 4 to 3.5, on the other hand...As far as the story itself goes, like most kindle-short romances, it's nothing necessarily out of the ordinary or away from formula; when you're reading stories like that (which is, when it comes down to it, at least 95% of the contemporary romances I've read), the tipping point is going to be the skill of the writer. Lucy Morgan's got it. Realistic characters in realistic situations, with a good deal of amusement involved, a recent bad breakup on which characters can vent, and a new flame that is, if a little on the predictable side, at least a touch more plausible for a straight romance than the other book I've reviewed recently with this same basic setup (tomboy living with two males), Mari Carr's <em>Tequila Truth</em>. (That said, Carr's romance is not straight at all, it's bent in all sorts of delicious ways.) Good stuff. Now if only the product description included all the stuff it needs to (publisher, page count, blah blah blah). ***