If I have to summarize this debut novel in three words, that would be contrived, wordy, and sappy.

Yet, on the Amazon site it has oodles of five stars. Go figure. Another thing I couldn't figure out was that the novel was shown to have an editor. An editor who let a novel go to print with construction holes and a typo or two.

In the story, Wrynn the protagonist, her twin brother Liam, and her one and only love Tripp grow up together. After 9/11 Tripp joins the army. Tripp and Wrynn get married and have three daughters. Wrynn gets the news that Tripp is killed, while pregnant with the third child. After three years of sorrow and endless melodrama Tripp shows up. He was held hostage in the jungle when the chopper he was in exploded. Because of the lofty explanations of Tripp's joining the armed forces and the connotation of it to 9/11, I had gathered he would be sent either to a desert or a mountainous region, but no, he got lost in the jungle, and found his way to Wrynn, somehow. How, it is not told. This is off-handedly explained away as his being in a secret mission. As a reader, I don't look kindly on unexplained secrets. This book, on the other hand, is full of them.

And there are many secrets in the book. Wrynn's mother's actions for example. Well, she is not his real mother, and she hates everybody. Plus she does all sorts of nasty things to people. This is explained in the last chapter as her having Alzheimer's for twenty years that no one knew about. This explanation felt like a last-minute cop-out to me.

Then there's the unfinished sub-storyline about Liam's once-upon-a-time girlfriend who shows up in town with two small children who look like they are Liam's, but that storyline is cut as is. The author explains at the end of the book that Liam's story will be the second book in the series. I felt, too much information was given here to leave this sub-story dangling.

Then there's the main character's unexplained mental condition. Her phobias, her panic attacks do not have a basis. As she had a perfectly happy childhood with model parents, how did she develop these abnormalities?

With holes left in its construction, this novel felt underdone to me.

people who love really soapy soap-operas.

the writer's mentioning the Wounded warrior Project and other important charities in the novel.

the main character and the story in general.

Read at your own risk.
The book is too long where emotions are regurgitated over and over again. Yet, the concrete facts are not given much importance or are lightly passed over.
As a personal preference, I don't rate first novels too low, but this one is just too melodramatic for my taste.

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Created Dec 26, 2013 at 12:12pm • Submit your own review...