Well, a sugary romance story, meant to make you (or girls at any rate) swoon, suffers from unimaginative telling of the story. It is too sweet, it is too ideal and it is a bit sickening really. The story starts interestingly enough, but right after the preface goes stupid and stays stupid all the way through. A heroine who cannot think past one thing and a hero who is everything a girl would want, patient, chiseled, sexy, understanding, metrosexual, infinitely patient, blah blah. Fool For Love, in the same category, is a far better book. It is supposedly the first book in a series. Hmmm.
Story?
Newly married Poppy Maysen is in love with her husband Jamie. When she sends him to the liquor store to get supplies for an upcoming party they are to host, a policeman comes back instead of Jamie and lets her know that Jamie has been killed in a bar robbery gone wrong. All this in the preface setting the stage for the usual ‘I don’t even want to think about men’ kind of situation where our romantic story heroines find themselves in the beginning of innumerous books.
She decides to start a restaurant, and meets quirky people. Her friend Molly helps her and we find that Molly and her husband are separated but have joint custody of their children. The book feels like a cardboard cutout with the obligatory professions of love between mother and children, the children’s affection for ‘aunty’ Poppy and a whole lot of scenes that could have been engineered by a less than moderately clever algorithm.
Now Molly is not only Poppy’s best friend but is also her brother Finn’s ex wife. Though he loves her and she loves him, he cannot ‘forgive what she has done’. Also Poppy has Jamie’s ‘Birthday List’ and every time she finishes off one task, she cries. (Oh it is so boring even to write these!).
Finn could not overlook Molly’s false step when, in the throes of a huge domestic disagreement, she chose to ‘sleep with a random stranger and confessed to Finn about it’. He was not ready to pardon her ‘even though he was still in love with her’. With no exploration of the thoughts of these people, which a serious author would have attempted, these are dropped on your lap.
I hear you say ‘Oh come on! This is just a romantic story, don’t be such a wet blanket, analyzing every little paragraph! You are just supposed to go with the flow’. OK, point taken.
But that is not the main story. Like innumerable books, when she tries to do ‘one session’ of Karate, she meets Cole, who was the cop bringing her the bad news about Jamie. He is her Karate teacher. They feel the spark instantly, and even more so when he comes late into her restaurant and she makes him a sandwich. When he catches his lazy, unscrupulous colleague Simmons stringing her along just to ogle at her – breasts particularly – he whisks her away for lunch.
She chooses, unwittingly, the mother of Cole for her next task, Ukulele lesson. And has dinner with her too. After that Cole agrees to do the list with her and also take over the investigation into Jamie’s death from the useless Simmons.
Poppy meets Jamie’s parents who are upset with her, and blame her for their son’s death – if she had not sent him over for beer, he would still be alive. Cole takes her to amusement park rides, another item on Jamie’s list.
She makes up with Jimmy, Jamie’s dad but the mom and the brother are cold to her. She mopes and mopes and mopes. Cole waits and waits and waits. So what is new? More of this, where she bathes in a pool made of Jell O and stuff.
And Cole is the ideal man – ripped, an insatiable but considerate lover in bed, a metrosexual, kindly, able – in other words, her fantasy come to life. Sure. This is a romantic story.
And coincidence after coincidence, everyone sweet and sugary (OK, except some rare people and even that is told unemotionally), everything nice Poppy does turns out to be a great coincidence, Get the gist?
2/10
– – Krishna
bookspluslife 