AfterEllen.com Book Club discussion

I have a copy of this one, so I'm really hoping to get to it, if not this month, sometime! :)

Don't forget the sequel, Aftermath! Great characterization by this author.

A bit late to this party, but I wanted to post this here in case anyone else reads this book after the fact, like I did.

SPOILERS!!!!!


I'm going by the Goodreads star ranking, and 3 stars is "I liked it." I did like it. The slow burn relationship was satisfying, and the payoff was good. The ending with the attack, the fire, and then Henry was actually quite enjoyable and suspenseful. It was realistic conflict, and I think it was a good climax of the story.

My major beef with this story, however, is how unrealistic the characters are, Maddie in particular. She's gorgeous, a wealthy, amazing doctor, a pilot, a mechanical whiz, a wine guru, a musician, she speaks fluent Spanish, she lives in the most beautiful house ever, selflessly takes in random children, and is generally perfect, perfect, PERFECT. C'mon... no one is like that. Without flaws, she just doesn't feel real to me, and that bugged me. The same is true of Syd, though to a lesser degree.

It also bugged me that the dialogue was so... unrealistic. People don't talk like that. It sometimes felt like I was just reading a thesaurus entry or something; it was just so forced. Plus the constant bickering, though it was sometimes sweet and did move the character/relationship development along, got tiresome after a while.

I'm also torn about the length. I LOVE a good long seduction, but this one was a bit *too* long for me. It got to the point where I just had a hard time believing that two people who spent that much time alone together, drinking that much wine, who hugged and touched and kissed each other's foreheads that much, really took that long to kiss. It was great until it just went on a tad bit too long.

All this said (can you tell that I'm a critical snob?!), I still enjoyed reading it. I mean, I obviously did because I've already started the sequel. Even though it's got some mechanical and realism issues, it's still a great, sexy love story, which is really all it needs to be.