Review: I found it oddly melodramatic
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 12 2, 2010
Warning: This review might contain what some people consider SPOILERS.Rating: 5/10PROS:- I love reading about exotic people with tons of money. There's a definite fairytale angle to this story: everything Law touches is lush and glamorous and decadent.- The storyline is a perfect little gift-wrapped Happily Ever After. What normal person wouldn't want to be the guy a large, hot, masculine, domineering billionaire falls for?- I really got the impression that Morrow had done her research on cars. There's a definite sense that Tom loves his job as a mechanic. Even the exposition is rather automobile-focused: "the tall ancient windows leaked air like slashed tires."- There's quite a bit of humor in the exposition, especially toward the beginning of the story when Law has just come back into Tom's life. And there are numerous descriptions of settings and minor characters that are fresh and concise. Here's one: "Mother was a brittle, blonde drinking straw dressed in Dior."CONS:- The story has some grave elements: blackmail, a scary/uncomfortable sex scene, a near-death experience, etc. And then it has stretches of fantasy and melodrama and extremely flowery description ("His blood effervesced"; "Tom's [you-know-what] spilled joyously over both of them"; "Law's sex filled Tom with exquisite wonder"). I think I would have loved the story if it had stayed on one side or the other: if it had been either a serious drama or a self-aware piece of fluff that doesn't take itself too seriously.- In theory, I liked Law's self-assured poise and his excessive confidence. However, many times I was put off by his actions because I saw them as demonstrations of a superiority complex. If I had seen some scenes from Law's perspective and gotten a sense of exactly how he feels about Tom, I think this would have been less of an issue for me. But there are only 2 or 3 scenes in the book from Law's POV, and the first one occurs 70% of the way through. And other reviewers have mentioned "the scene" of domination in the bedroom--I will simply agree with those who didn't like it.- The editing--especially as pertains to the story's formatting--is horrible. Aside from a large number of typos and such, there's no difference in the appearance of regular text and characters' thoughts. So the writing switches willy-nilly from third person to first, and from past tense to present, with no indication that we've jumped from external exposition to a character's head.Overall comments: There are a lot of elements here that I love: it's a Cinderella story with a seriously loaded prince, and once the story progresses to the point where the characters are sleeping together, they do it a LOT. But the writing was just too over-the-top for me. The flowery descriptions and the short, barely-developed scenes and the melodrama reminded me of Stormy Glenn's writing, but unlike Glenn's stories, I felt like this one didn't REALIZE it was melodramatic. Force of Law has moments that are so earnest that the over-the-top scenes seemed really jarring to me in comparison.