Jeanne Harrell, $2.99, ISBN 978-1311842992
Contemporary Romance, 2015

Dr Ben Granger is quite the science prodigy, as he blew up his home lab a few times—in fiction, science gone awry is a clear sign that you’re actually great at it—but as an adult, he still hasn’t found a way to overcome his phobia of water.

Hence, it is with great reluctance that he heads over to Lake Tahoe for some kind of research in order to secure a huge research grant for the university.

Well, what do you know, a romance with an elementary schoolteacher, Robin Walker, and her plot device of a son that keeps going missing or falling headfirst into bodies of water will cure him of his phobia! It’s the combo of fear-evaporating sex and dramatic rescues of idiot children that never fails to work, every time.

Well, that’s Jeanne Harrell’s Winemaker’s Son in a nutshell. If you ask me to describe it using a short phrase for TL; DR purposes, I’d say: “It’s alright, but blah.”

The author’s narrative style is readable, but she likes to have her characters use very showy similes and metaphors that most people don’t normally use on a spontaneous manner. As a result, every adult character in this story talks like they are the mouthpieces of a hive-mind, instead of individuals with their own distinct personality traits and quirks as well as from different education background, cultures, and other aspects that can help shape how one speaks. In other words, every character here is actually Jeanne Harrell.

The story is also bogged down by filler chapters early on. For example, once Ben is told that he needs to go to Lake Tahoe or the fate of all academia is a bleak one, the next few chapters are all about different characters trying to get him to go there anyway. This is repetitive, especially when each character is clearly the author wearing a different skin suit.

Once the romance takes off at about the midway point, things start to move on a brisker pace, but once again, the sameness in which the characters all talk in this talk-heavy story remains a constant distraction to me.

Worse, the author uses the heroine’s kid shamelessly as a brat-in-distress to force the romance and character development in a most eye-rolling transparent “And now, the plot device in action… watch!” manner.

Do all these issues make the story unreadable? No, from a technical standpoint, this is a readable story without any pain-inducing problems like terrible grammar and sentence construction.

However, this issues make the story come off as very artificial, and I can never forget even for a second that I am reading a story, a work of fiction. To me, a good story is one that pulls me into the story and make me feel like I’m living in the author’s make-believe world. Here, though, I am always aware that I’m just a reader reading a story.

Hence, this one’s alright, but blah.