Review: Plot Is Too Simple
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 08 13, 2012
The premise for this story was promising, but the author did not develop Jenna and Nico enough so that we could see why they loved each other. At the outset, Jenna and Nico have been divorced for 10 years. The reasoning behind their initial split just made no sense to me--they were already married (at around 18 years old), but her parents objected to the marriage, so they convinced Jenna to go to Italy for several months with them so that she could get away from Nico. As far as I'm concerned, she basically chose her parents over her husband at that point, but I let it pass and kept on reading. While in Italy, she realized she couldn't live without him and insisted that her parents bring her home. It was on the way to the airport that a car accident killed her parents, injured her sister, and left Jenna with two broken legs and a miscarriage. In order to allow Nico to live his dream, she convinced him she wanted a divorce and never told him about the baby.We then jump to the present day where Nico sees Jenna on TV because she's just opened a restaurant. He flies to New York to see her, and the attraction, of course, is renewed instantaneously. With virtually no discussion and no development, they fall in love with each other again. I won't go into a lot of detail because this is still fairly early on in the story, but suffice it to say that I did not think there was enough between the H and h to make me care whether or not they got back together. I couldn't relate to either character. And the factor that made me download the book in the first place--Nico's being a professional athlete--was so tangential to the plot it might as well not have been there. There were no insights into professional sports or professional athletes--had his dream been to be a garbage collector, the story really wouldn't have been much different.This story wasn't bad, it just wasn't especially good. I only read the first offering--Playing For Keeps--and I'm not sure that I'll be bothered with the second story at all.