Liquid Silver Books, $4.99, ISBN 978-1-62210-219-8
Sci-fi Romance, 2015
Winterfall starts out pretty promisingly, as, unlike the previous two stories in Denise A Agnew’s The Wasteland series, it has a heroine who doesn’t need too much rescuing – a nice change of pace from those previous stories. However, there isn’t much of anything else happening here either.
Juliet Van Pelt is one of the survivors in an America forever changed by a cataclysmic volcanic eruption. She volunteers to be a firefighter, along the way meets our hero Mark O’Day, some things happen, Juliet has some daddy angst, and then they connect and hook up, the end. Oh, and there is a fellow firefighter who goes all sexual harassment creep on Juliet, but that’s about it. It’s a shame, really, as the author has created a setting here only to fail to make use of its uniqueness, resorting instead to some standard love-amidst-the-drama stuff that could fit in easily in any contemporary romance story.
Both characters are fine, although I’m still not sure why Juliet is so cranky. Then again, if the world changed on you in one earth-shattering kaboom, I guess being cranky is to be expected. The characters have decent chemistry, and the story is well-paced for something of its length.
But it ends pretty quickly, and I am left feeling that the author could have done something more memorable with this setting of hers. What a pity, really.
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