Sheena Binkley, $0.99, ISBN 978-1311499103
Contemporary Romance, 2015
The plot synopsis of Sheena Binkley’s Reclaiming What Is Mine sounds good on paper.
Asia Alexander’s marriage to Dwight is slowly falling apart, especially after she’s lost her job and they end up losing their place because Dwight has never really been good in working with her to keep things together. She meets Bryon Gibson, and he is everything Dwight isn’t. Eventually she is conflicted: choose the man that makes her happy and loses her marriage, or stay with Dwight and spend the rest of her life wondering about what could have been.
That’s the plot synopsis. In reality, this one is a jaw-dropping example of how to ruin one’s story with just the opening chapter.
Yes, the author opens the story with Asia choosing Bryon, and then has the story goes back six months earlier to show me why she chooses that guy.
Sigh. That’s like giving away the identity of the villain in a murder mystery, and then going back to show me how the investigators figure out the whole thing. Why do this? Surely someone could have told the author that this opening chapter would rid the rest of the story of any hint of suspense, anticipation, etc.
It’s not like there is much to learn or discover during the rest of the story, either, as the direction and key details of the story are laid out in the plot synopsis—the marriage is breaking down, the heroine meets a nice guy—and now, thanks to the opening chapter, I know she picks Bryon and will eventually divorce Dwight. Is there any reason for me to read the whole story?
The author doesn’t make things easier by having Dwight being, from the very beginning, the obvious bad guy with very few redeeming qualities. From the get go, he’s shown to be a cheater and a lousy husband that can’t be depended upon for anything. If the author had made this fellow more human, I may want to find out what will happen to him, and hence I have some reason to read the story. No, sorry, he’s trash.
This one boasts the standard set of issues typically related to self-published efforts: unpolished narrative that tends to tell more than show, too much exposition dumping from the very beginning, and characters that telegraph their actions way too clearly and early. Additionally, reading this one has me feeling that the author is perhaps too eager to share this story to her readers, so much so that she just has to give away every detail right from the start.
This isn’t a good thing because when I know everything I need to know so early in the story, I don’t have any reason to read the rest of the story. Because of the author showing her hand way too early, so to speak, this story ends up being way too long for something that has zero suspense or build-up or anything else that could have made turning the page a fun and exciting experience.
