Disappointing all around

I bought this book because I have enjoyed a number of Donna Kauffman’s stories, including her Blue Hallow Falls series. Sadly, this collection of short stories left me disappointed.

The first story by Fern Michaels was absolutely awful. I tried, really tried, to engage with the characters and get into the story but I just couldn’t connect with them. I found the story quite jumpy and disconnected. It didn’t help that the narrator had a weird habit of pausing in the middle of sentences. It was like she dropped one of the slight pauses that you would have at the end or a sentence or after certain punctuation in the middle of sentences. It could be forgiven every once in a while, but she did it ever 2nd or 3rd sentence and it made the listening experience very jarring. And for whatever reason, I found the endless descriptions of the (highly unrealistic) mother/baby relationship to be grating. One minute the main character would be thinking/commenting how hard it was to care for a baby and the next she would spend an hour and a half getting a haircut/manicure/pedicure while the baby slept in the pram. That baby never did anything but sleep…she slept the entire (trans-Atlantic) flight, then the entire 4 hour car journey directly afterwards and then that they arrived just in time to settle her down before bedtime. That might be possible for an 8 day old baby or maybe even an 8 week old baby but certainly not an 8 month old one. Or that the mom gave up breast feeding at 6 months but then nearly forgot to buy formula at the store 2 months later because she was “so used to breastfeeding”.

The second story by Donna Kauffman was slightly better but the narrator was even worse with this story. She couldn’t handle the mixture of American, Irish, Scottish and Australian accents the characters were supposed to have. She would flip flop between the different accents so half the sentence would be in an American accent and the other half slightly Irish (and that might be for the Scottish character or the Australian one). The story itself lacked any real depth. I don’t think it added anything to the series.

The narrator actually did okay with the third story, but the storyline was just too dull and predictable. It was very cliché.

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