Review: A tolerable tale that needs editing
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 01 30, 2012
I received Santa is a Lady, by LJ Holmes, as a review copy submitted to "Red Adept Reviews" by the author.Overall: 2 3/4 StarsPlot/Storyline: 3 StarsSanta is a Lady is your basic fantasy romance at Christmas, where "fantasy" means "emotional brain fluff". If that's your bag, baby, this book will tell you a happy tale of the making of a new family unit, fixing what's broken in the hearts of two damaged characters.This book follows the classic three-act romantic pattern: boy meets girl; misunderstandings ensue; boy and girl live happily ever after. Along the way, basically nothing and no one gets in their way; they do a swell job of postponing the inevitable all by themselves. There's very little actual tension in the plot as a result. Most is ironic tension, existing only in one character's mind at a time.Too much of the plot development and emotion in the story depends on Angie's decision at the beginning of the book, where she agrees to play Santa for her desperate friend Beck. This one act is burdened with starting the plot as well as maintaining all its twists. I didn't see a big deal in her choice, but the characters take turns being hateful and disgusted at each other over it until the third act ups the romantic action.The end is sweet and funny and predictable, but the love scene just prior to the end really jarred me out of the book's mood; it's not that sort of romance book, until suddenly it is. I think the book would be better without it.Character Development: 2 StarsThe characters in this novel are terribly inconsistent. They're subject to the whim of the next scene, as if they're each played by a tag-team of actors who don't tell each other what occurred in the previous scene. There was no smoothness to their transitions between feeling attraction and acting on snap-judgment fallacies about each other. Most of the scenes in the second act were variations on one of them suddenly deciding to insult the other, when moments before they had felt generous or apologetic.The actions of the BFF/villain character, Beck, complicated the triangle of relationships, but one  misunderstanding on her part was so intense, and then so quickly explained as wrong by another character, that she came across as schizophrenic. She did smooth out nicely at the end, though, regaining some believability.Angie was by far the most developed and likeable character (aside from Johara's cuteness). At one point, she gets to stand up for herself and say that someone else is mistreating her--one of my favorite parts of any novel with a heroine who's taken advantage of. Her past was established, and her daily difficulties with her chronic disabilities were shown through her everyday actions. The only place this failed was during the love scene, where a previously established hip weakness--Angie's re-injured by a child--vanishes so as not to kill the mood. In real life, pressing a woman who can barely walk to engage in the book's described activity as if she's uninjured would be inconsiderate and offensive. My complaint has nothing to do with a handicapped person getting some lovin'. It's that her physical constraints can't be allowed to affect the rhythm of the process, that somehow she's not "sexy" unless her injuries disappear. Yet when they do, she stops being Angie and turns into a generic object of desire.Despite his role as the hunky guy, I lost interest in Cam early on, when the past murder of his wife--the mother of his child--was given a single sentence. I know Angie becomes his love interest, but he fails completely at believability when he shows no sign of mourning, anger, or even guilt and conflict for his new feelings for her. He's also said to be "deeply" in debt, but he doesn't have a job, and he takes Angie on a long shopping trip to the mall.Johara was an adorable child, at somewhere over two years old. Her speech patterns were cute and fit the book's mood nicely. Her part in the book was extended by the hint of paranormalcy, shared with Angie's grandmother, but the effect fell somewhere between plot device and "the magic of Christmas".Writing Style: 2 1/2 StarsThe overall writing style in this novel is amateur. It feels rushed and unedited. Tone varies wildly and abruptly: sweet and romantic, psychotic, musing, corny. It suffers from sudden explosions of cursing, and the love scene at the end felt tacked-on purely to satisfy readers who wanted one. The plot and the characters were managing just fine without it, and the next scene made it moot, anyway.The dialogue was consistent with the modern setting and the ages of the characters. Cam had lots of variation between his nice voice, his confrontational voice, and his love scene voice, though, and his speaking parts made him seem to be three different people.Due to the sloppy writing, cat's tails are sentient, hair has breath, and spines are celibate. In a couple of scenes, Beck and Cam are repeatedly addressed or mentioned by their full names in quick succession, but not in all the other scenes.Editing: 2 StarsThe description posted on Amazon at the time of this review did not inspire confidence in the author's grammar and punctuation abilities, and indeed, the book delivered on an equivalent level. I noted over a hundred basic mistakes before I was halfway through the book, at which point I just gave up and started to skim. At different points, the author managed to misspell both "Santa Claus" and "Kris Kringle".