Dee Gibbens, $1.99, ISBN 978-1386704447
Contemporary Romance, 2017
I know I am going to have a most painful time with Dee Gibbens’s For Better or for Worse when, on the first page itself, the hero Kole Deveraux starts out in his truck thinking about his awesome wife Evie that he is driving home to. Somehow, thinking of his awesome wife leads to him having a flashback, complete with paragraphs that are all in italics, of how his father died after falling down from a horse.
I guess his father dying and him getting the ranch ranks up there with him having an awesome wife that does all the housework and ranch work with an A+ kind of finesse.
Yes, this is a Christian romance. How did you guess?
The awesome memory of his father spending three days in pain before expiring has him then recalling how he and Evie had been sweethearts from the moment they were in the cradle—is this a Louisiana thing?—and how he had been an awesome ranch boss after taking over from his dead daddy.
Puffed up by all these wonderful memories, he calls his wife on the auto-dial while still behind the wheel to tell her how much money he is bringing back to her, and oops, his vehicle rams into car with two teenagers, killing them and leaving Kole paralyzed from the waist down. Oh no, now he will never be able to go forth and procreate! What will Jesus say?
The whole tragic thing with his waist down—oh, and two dead kids, but whatever, they are probably heathens anyway—could have been avoided had he just stopped at the roadside to touch himself and moan to his wife over the phone about how awesome he is and will always be, hallelujah, but the author tells me that no, it’s not really Kole’s fault.
You see, a car was running down the wrong way—a red car too, the color of hell fire!—and the kids behind the wheel of that car from hell were drinking, so, you know, totally not his fault that he wasn’t paying attention to the road and all.
I wonder: is this the author’s way of justifying that it’s perfectly fine to make inane “Love you! Love you too!” calls over the phone when one is behind the wheel of a vehicle? I know “Jesus take the wheel” is one of the holy scriptures in the Bible and all, but come on, spread the good word in a way that doesn’t insult my intelligence, please. There is nothing wrong with Kole not calling and just being caught unaware by the red car from hell.
Having Kole daydream about his father’s joyous death and what not before calling his wife isn’t just a lazy way of dropping exposition bombs on me; in this case, it actually sabotages the author’s effort and makes me give the hero the most side eye of side eyes.
Likewise, there is one scene where Kole, raging because his legs aren’t working, hits Evie so hard that she falls back and hits her head to become unconscious. Now, what is this scene supposed to prove? It is one thing if the author wanted to demonstrate the destructive effects of unchecked rage, but no, this scene just happens and the heroine has already forgiven him anyway ten minutes before he gives her a fist whopper, so… I don’t know. Is the author trying to justify domestic abuse within the context of a Christian marriage?
Now, I’m not saying that the author’s intention is just that. What I’m saying is that reading this story gives me some most unfortunate impression about the author’s intention, and worst of all, those questionable scenes add little to the story—rather, they end up instead doing more than harm than good.
In other words, the author is really cutting off her own nose here, so to speak, but I’m not sure if she had been aware as to why she did that. She may have been instead sabotaging her own story without realizing it, and that would be the biggest tragedy here.
Yes, Kole is having survivor’s guilt and plenty of self-pity about his state. Again, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The author could have used this premise for deep, difficult emotional drama, but no, instead, Kole spends the entire story raging and shouting IN ALL CAPS until all of a sudden, he can walk like normal and his pee-pee is super hard and ready to explode—no, really, this may be a God-fearing romance, but it isn’t fearful of talking about the hero’s erection—and then he immediately transforms into a more reasonable fellow.
As a result, Kole comes off as a nice guy only when things are going his way, and he turns into a rage beast when things aren’t. That’s not exactly happily ever after material.
Meanwhile, the author’s narrative style is all over the place. Too much telling and not even showing is one thing, but there are also annoying flashbacks, all in italics, that often pop up at the most bizarre moments and serve nothing to advance the story at all. Characters don’t talk like people, more like exposition dump machines, and huge swathes of the story are just people making excuses for Kole’s antics.
In other words, this one is clearly the work of an amateur author, one that is best kept aside for a re-visit when the author has developed enough polish to fine-tune it for proper publication. Then again, I’m not sure how this story could have been fine-tuned—a complete dynamiting of the whole thing and starting from scratch may be the better course of action.
