Review: Not much of an escape...
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 07 8, 2014
Real life is not escape for me. This collection is women's fiction, but this is not the stuff of the fairer sex. The author paints with broad heavy handed strokes. There is no subtlety in her repertoire. Why tap with a hammer when you can bludgeon with a sledge hammer?The first story, Composing Myself, took up 38% of this collection. It's the story of 3 generations - Grams, Patty and Whitney, and the ways we can hurt our family while trying to do what we believe is right. The 3 main female characters were well fleshed out and you felt that you understood them even if you didn't like them. Stan and Reid were nice, loving and supportive men. The other characters were cliche caracatures, or bit players, a little too convenient running in and out of scenes. The story is long and feels a little choppy with 2 chapters of Whitney and 1 of Patty, 2 Whitney, 1 Patty, etc. but toward the end you get used to it. I liked the story while I was reading it, but it's like a made for TV movie. You watch it when you know you should be doing something else, and then when it's over you beat yourself up about not using your time more productively.Betty and Veronica is a very short story about friendship, but I felt manipulated. One character gets cancer and the other cares for her friend. Real feelings and emotions were not dealt with by the characters. Again, it felt TV movie like, jerking my emotions around without really giving me anything.By chapter 6 of Drawing Free, I was so sick of pitiful, negative, whiny Becca, I wanted to bury her in the self-help books she obviously wasn't grasping! I am at the 50% mark and I am so done with this box set! Hardly the "escape" I was hoping for.I buy box sets as I use them to find authors I do and don't like. While I feel this author has some talent, I don't really care for her writing. All of her stories read like bad made for TV movies. She switches back and forth between first and third person and sometimes changes tense within a sentence throughout her stories. I also felt her vocabulary could use a little work as some of her word choices were poor. There were too many catchable errors, like added or forgotten words, if anyone did a proofread.