Review: Clear, Effortless Writing
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 04 2, 2014
Christina Jones has three books out now, and I am already excited about the fourth. She caught my attention with ‘Strictly Professional’ and had it completely locked in with ‘Love and Other Things.’ And now, ‘The Trouble with Love’ solidifies for me that she is an author to watch.This book, like her others, has a self-assured voice, with characters that were believable and lovable, who you feel like you know, could know or be friends with. In ‘The Trouble with Love’, we get to follow along on the romantic misadventures of Cameron and Jai, two sisters whose love for each other is the only love of which they can be completely certain.Jai is a spirited but romantically-challenged chef, whose longtime relationship has ended with a blow, and who engages in a sexually-charged cat-and-mouse game with her best friend. Further complicating matters is Jai’s fine but way-too-young neighbor who might be good for a fling but probably not much more.Then there’s Cameron, the hyper-competent, got-it-all-together sister with the high-powered career and perfect fiancée.But over the course of just under a year, both Jai and Cameron have their beliefs about themselves and about love challenged by the interesting, flawed and very attractive (though in different ways) men in their lives. I loved the trip Jai and Cameron took, and particularly loved that Christina Jones made the characters multi-dimensional and imperfect. Kyle in particular embodied for me the many forms that love can take, and the ways it can confuse and befuddle us, and cause us to make bad decisions without turning us into bad people.Jai was for me the quintessential smart-in-life, but foolish-in-love woman that we all know, or have been sometime in our pasts. I thought, based on the title, that I might be reading a romance, but did not expect happily-ever-after because there is nothing about Christina Jones’ writing that implies you’re reading a fantasy. It’s a little like eavesdropping, or having a friend relay a story about mutual friends . There is nothing about her writing that makes you feel like you’re “reading a story” until, dammit, it ends.I highly recommend reading this and her other work.