Mona Ingram, $2.99, ISBN 978-1927745519
Contemporary Romance, 2019
“Are you and Daddy getting a divorce?”
Anna’s hand stilled. “My goodness. Whatever made you ask that?”
“Last year at pre-school Alexandra said that her father stopped coming home for supper. Her mother cried a lot and pretty soon her parents got divorced. She said that’s the way it works.”
Wait, do little brats speak like this Amanda, the creepy little old-woman-trapped-in-a-little-girl’s-body thing in this story? Amanda will speak in a very obviously little girl way and then abruptly switch into “Hello, fellow little girls, how do you do?” kind of speaking in a way that has me thinking of demonic possession of little kids in those haunted house movies out there.
Despite what the cover art may lead folks to think, the title of this story is actually Something Special. Love in a Bottle refers to the name of the series, of which this is one of the entries. Just like the name of the series will suggest, a message in a bottle brings a couple together. This time around, the message is written by Anna’s cheating husband, which somehow leads a new man into her life. Hmm, will it work if I write a note asking for ten million dollars, stuff it into a jar, and throw it down the river?
Now, this one is just… I’m tempted to say “experimental” because it’s a long weekend where I live and I want to be kinder than I normally am. For a while I am wondering whether I am reading mainstream women’s fiction and someone is going to die by the last page, but no, this is a romance novel at its core, only structured in a way that may make some reader scratch their heads.
Now, you may be ready to scream at me, “Wait, weren’t you screaming that you were bored of formulaic crap these last few weeks, and now you’re complaining about getting something out of the usual stuff?”—hear me out. My perplexity has nothing to do with the fact that the author is going out of the formulaic route. No, it has to do with the choices she makes here.
This story starts with a prologue that apparently shows up in every title in this series, likely because the author is planning for the couple in the prologue to be the stars in the grand finale of the series. However, there is no clear indication once I start reading the first chapter onward as to the link between the prologue and this story. If there is some kind of gimmick or story arc connecting every title in this series together, I am not seeing it in this entry. As a result, I already start the story feeling a little disoriented.
The author sets the stage with Anna feeling betrayed by her husband, and then all of a sudden I am dragged into a flashback as to how they met and she got knocked up. The fact that he was less than thrilled about her pregnancy and vanished for a few days after should have been a warning flag, but hey, romance heroine will always romance heroine. At any rate, I start to wonder whether this is a reunion romance, then. Considering that he cheated on her, I can only bid the author good luck in convincing the average reader to accept the cheater as the romance hero.
No, instead, for some reason that is ill-explained, the cheating SOB instead writes an uncharacteristically flowery letter, puts it into a bottle, and throws it into the river.
Then, I am abruptly introduced into a set of new characters in the next chapter. Wait, wait, what happened to Anna and her possessed daughter? Have we now transitioned to the actual couple of the story now that the previous cast have served its purpose and the bottle has been thrown? Confused, I read on until eventually, much later, one of the blokes meets Anna and I’m like, oh, so now the real romance begins.
Then I get a rushed love story of two cardboard characters falling in love quickly and decide to be a family with that creepy possessed girl.
Oh boy, where do I even begin with this? It’s all gimmick. The actual substance, the romance, is poorly developed and feels more like filler to put onto the pages once the author has done setting up what she hopes will be an interesting sideshow to impress the readers. Now, this kind of thing may work for literary fiction, but this one is marketed as a romance story, so I come into this one expecting a rich, well-developed romance. Instead, I get what is equivalent of the author spending more time juggling balls instead of telling me a story.
A bigger problem here is the lack of linkages that enable the reader to still go with transitions between chapters and time skips without feeling confused. Chapters jump from one cast to another in abrupt and often random-like manner that make me wonder whether I’d somehow started reading a different story altogether without me realizing it. Characters often do showy, melodramatic nonsense like putting letters into bottles—really, who does that these days on a whim?—without any apparent motive behind such actions; they just do things to move the story along, because the author wants them to and she also wants me to notice that she is pulling all the characters’ strings.
There is also no indication that the story is going somewhere in the midst of the all the disorienting jumps from characters to settings to time frame. As a result, I am just turning the page, lost most of the time and wondering whether the author is ever going to take me anywhere.
Something Special is the first story I’ve read in ages that drives home how important it is for an author to make sure that the reader is keeping up with what she imagines to be fantastic leaps of glory in her head. To the author, sure. every development in this story makes perfect sense. To me, however, I need to know that there is a link between one chapter and the next, the new cast have a role to play in the overarching plot as well as future interaction with the cast in the previous chapter, and there is a plot that is making progress from one chapter to the next. The author does none of that here. The story gives off this impression that it is leaping from point A to C to H to Z to wherever else at random, and I stop caring about the story because I don’t see any reason why I should.
The best part of this misfire is the prologue, but just like everything else about this one, that part feels like random paragraphs tossed together onto a page with no link to the rest of the chapters in this story. Yes, the author is writing in English, and I can understand the sentences in this story just fine. The fundamental aspects of the story, however—coherence, transition, flow—are completely broken. This story is definitely something special alright, but not in a good way.
