I Like Books

I first saw this book on the B&N new release page back over the summer…or was it back last Christmas? I’ve never read a book by this author before but the excerpt and summary provided on the B&N website made the book seem like it would be a nice, light read, just the thing I could spend a rainy weekend on. Naturally, I never wrote the title or author down and it wasn’t until I was in a Hastings last week when I just so happen to quite literally stumble upon the book while browsing. And oh-my-Lanta was this book dull.

Essentially, it’s based for an older audience. An audience who likes to spend their mid-mornings watching their “shows”. This book is the 11th book in the series and as I slowly found out, most of the characters were middle-aged, quite the opposite of the twenty-somethings I had been picturing in my mind for the first half of the book.

The back of the book suggests that this is the story that follows one family the book really follows a small town. There were so many story lines and characters to keep track of, no wonder this book got nowhere fast. And, of course, everything turned out swell in the end, all conflicts were either resolved or well on their way to getting resolved happily ever after. Nobody had an affair, died or experienced any kind of trauma.

While those details irritated me throughout the book what really put me off was all the skimming over the author seemed to do. You spend one chapter reading about a character's story and then the next time you run into them a few days to a week had passed and everything had been “talked out”. When the author did actually begin to dig into an actual story line, small details were skimmed over, especially when dealing with numbers...rent, salaries, and negotiations. It felt like laziness, almost.

The only aspect that kept me drawn in was the story line that was described on the back of the book, about the blended family that was having issues functioning as a new family unit. Here is where I could relate. Growing up with a parent who rushed into a relationship and bringing an almost complete stranger into her childhood home is no joke. But that’s another story for another time. Essentially I appreciated the way that story line was dealt with and the resolution (the one resolution, if you could say that) that the author came up with.

But by all means, if you’re not in your mid-forties go ahead and skip this. I’m going to go ahead and send it over to my own mother in an attempt to send passive-aggressive hints.