Review: Sweet little bit of nothing.
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 10 20, 2012
OK, the good:This is a very sweet story, two quite likeable protagonists, a cute love story, and it was free.The bad:It's painfully predictable. I'm all for a happily ever after, but this isn't just "can't wait for them to get together" but more of a "oh for Pete's sake will you two get it together, I'm getting frustrated now".There are way too many little typos and such for a book released by an established publishing house. I've read self-pubbed books that are better proofread.There's also a kind of self-conscious "hey look at me, I'm writing in a period appropriate way" that is undermined by a great many too-modern turns of phrase, and bits are just plain ugly/badly written. There are real clunkers like sights meeting eyes and sounds meeting ears, where seeing and hearing would sound far more natural, and sentences like:"She'd asked Him to send her the gentleman of her dreams, and He'd never failed to grant her requests before, hence the reason she was certain she'd get her man."I sometimes wonder if those trying to write period drama think that using appropriate language means using three words when one would do, or making things more complex than they need to be, or simply overusing the thesaurus: For me, this was a perfect example. I think the author has been badly served by her editor when things like this don't get polished up and made to sound less amateurish.I also wasn't at all convinced that some of the high jinks Charlotte indulged in were realistic for a woman of her age and class in that period.Overall, this is a sweet little story, and downloaded for free I'd say it's worth your time if you like a little inspirational romance, but it did not inspire me to buy any more of Jen Turano's work, so as a loss leader? For me, it failed.