Tag: debbie macomber

Title: My Hero
Bookit #5
Author: Debbie Macomber
Release Date: 2018 (current copy, originally printed by itself in 1992)
Medium: Paperback

My grade: D

In the second novel published together in Looking for a Hero,  we have novice novel writer Bailey who decides to essentially stalk someone to get inspiration for her main character.  Somehow the main guy, Parker, finds this intriguing rather than not and decides to go along with it and ends up taking her on dates disguised as ‘research’.   I found the main character paradoxically likeable and not.  She had many similarities with me, at least writer wise, and we even share a cat with the same name.  But other than that I find the whole thing just odd.

Who goes from “Why are you following me?”  to “Will you marry me?”  in just a few months? We learn so much about Bailey, whose the point of view character, but Parker remains hardly there except to fall in love with Bailey.  Like with its partner novel, Marriage Wanted, I feel like we are getting the first draft, with missing bits.  I feel this story misses a lot by doing a single point of view, and I find myself just not getting the characters or the situation.

Both novels were alright – I could finish them without throwing the book.  They helped me get through a very boring day of waiting in an office.  However, I was disappointed that this came from an author I have seen do better in the past.

Title:  Marriage Wanted
Bookit #4
Author: Debbie Macomber
Release Date: 2018
Medium: Paperback

My grade: D

I was actually fairly disappointed in this book.  I usually like Debbie Macomber, finding her books light and easy reads for days when I really could use light and fluffy.  This book however was not up to her usual fair, and has the signs of being a “well, I need to write something” type of story.

The premise of Marriage Wanted (part one of the duo in the paperback I bought) was that Savannah was a wedding planner who felt that Marriage was the thing to achieve, while Nash (a divorce) lawyer thought it was simply an outdated institution and nothing good came out of it.  He challenges her to marry him and test the theory out.

Or at least that is what the back of the book states.  It feels like a rough draft of a longer novel.  The pacing is awkward.  It’s slow at first, building up the characters (except at the same time taking jumps of time to not really understand their inter-character relationships at all). The second half of the book rushes everything, from the wedding, to the falling in love bit.  Issues that develop to give drama to the story are brushed over towards the end as if she was in a rush to get this story over with.

This is not the worst thing I have read, but as a story it needed more.