Arabesque, $6.99, ISBN 1-58314-335-1
Contemporary Romance, 2003
Angela Winters’s Saving Grace is a painful chore to read. The author changes the points-of-view in her writing every paragraph, sometimes even within paragraphs, so much so that I get exhausted just reading one chapter and trying to keep up with the head hopping going on here. The author comes off like an amateur in this book, when she certainly isn’t.
The story also suffers from a heroine that is not only passive and prone to crying, she also has an extreme daddy complex. Grace has created a truly convoluted plan of deception that will only work if coincidences and luck fall in her favor, and that is slightly less likely than me winning the jackpot in Vegas six times in a row at the slot machines. Which is in character for her, this whacked plan of hers, because Grace spends her whole life trying to please a father that doesn’t even acknowledge what she is doing for him. In fact, she is plotting to avenge her father for something that happened to Daddy thirty five years ago. She hopes that her father will be so overjoyed when she surprises him with this latest antic of hers, he will love her forever and ever. Why is she doing this? Is the stupid man’s love so important that Grace must do truly ridiculous things to get his approval? A valid explanation is simply, Grace is a very, very stupid woman to be doing this, but everyone here says that Grace is a smart lady. Maybe everybody in this book is stupid then. Let’s just leave it at that.
Grace decides to plot and get her restaurant-owner Daddy’s approval – so that he will realize what a smart girl she is and lets her run the restaurant so that she can make Daddy even more happy – by hiring hotshot lawyer Keith Hart under false pretenses. Between his comforting her as she stresses out, wrings her hands, bursts into tears, and laments about Daddy not loving her enough, they manage to fall in love. By that point, the author has driven me close to pulling all my hair out with her incessant head hopping. The horrible heroine and her ridiculous plans and even more pathetic attempts at seduction all add to the throbbing migraine that result from my trying to finish this book.
It must be a really bad day when the author wrote this book. Saving Grace (yes, save the heroine from herself, somebody) has too little saving graces to make it worth the effort of finishing this awfully plotted and horribly written book.
