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No Comments I’m No Elephant
Because they’re supposed to remember everything, right? Except that it isn’t so much that I’m FORGETTING to post; it’s more that it’s distracting when kids are home, I’m truly trying to work on projects, and I’m too tired to concentrate an unfortunate amount of the time. (And I’ve been gone. I’ve been to the temple two mornings this week and to the school to meet with the principal one.) I did just finish listening to the audio fluff I’ve been distracting myself with, however, and so I figured I’d better just get the review over with. Because MEH.
Summer Ever After was available immediately and had a premise with promise–Jane is lonely, and since she loves romance novels, she comes up with a dating plan and decides to apply romance tropes to her dates. Her dating pool is small, since she doesn’t want to leave the small island she’s lived on all her life (which necessitates dating men who live there and plan to stay there, most of whom she’s known all of her life), but she starts out with plans. (The tropes get more painfully forced as she goes along, but she does have plans.)
Unfortunately, she’s had some level of crush on her best friend’s older brother since middle school. This is problematic because a)he’s a golf pro who travels a lot and doesn’t live on the island when he’s not traveling, and b)when his family moved to the island, girls pretended to be friends with his younger sister to get to know him, so she was sensitive about it. If I were Kortney Keisel, I would have concentrated a lot harder on the first issue rather than the second, because 3/4 of a book is really too long to spend focusing on the obstacle of “I can’t date him because it would break her heart, we can’t date because she wouldn’t approve, etc.” Seriously? They signed a BFF pact in middle school, sure, but that’s not a strong enough plot device to take seriously for that long.
The other problem we’re dealing with* is Keisel’s metaphors and similes. Is she aiming for over-the-top cheese for the laugh? I can’t quote any of them since I listened to the book without a physical copy to reference, but they were definitely too far over the top–they took me out of the moment, which is kind of death for a romance novel.
*There’s actually a third problem, but it’s probably a harder line to find for an adult novel. Summer Ever After is marketed as a “sweet” romantic comedy, which means (more or less) that any sex is happening off the page. The problem is that Keisel’s a bit heavy handed with talk of desire and passion to just not address the ‘are they or aren’t they’ issue. I’m perfectly happy for there to be no sex happening while dating, but avoiding the topic completely was not the way to go. Since we’re doing elephant metaphors, it’s the equivalent of inviting the elephant into the room and then refusing to acknowledge it. I get that having your main couple talk about it is more work, but either leave the elephant out or invite it to the table.
Anyway. It looks like each book in the series has a different author, so I’m pondering giving the second one a try out of morbid curiosity, but I’m not going to be actively seeking out any more Keisel novels. Summer Ever After was distracting, yes, but it was a little too fluffy for me.