It was better than the DH's other book about these gypsy sisters (one of which reviewed here). But worse than the feeling you get after running a really good 5 miles. She's a good writer. The fact that she held my attention even with the juvenile mumbo jumbo about One True Love means that DH must be a really talented woman.
She: Overcommitted, in-control doctor who comes from a spacey family does everything in her power to control the outcomes in her own life - perfect apartment, perfect fiance etc etc. Everything falls apart when her psychic sister tells her who her One True Love is.
He: Carpenter, widowed father of an 8-year-old girl, is sweet and sad and missing his dead wife. Nice guy. A bit on the beta side but a nice guy all the same.
Besides finding the whole psychic/One True Love crap hugely silly, the main trouble I had with this was that the 8-year-old daughter is simultaneously portrayed as precocious and wise beyond her years and then at times, borderline retarded. She seems to wander around the city of Baltimore (not a very safe city, I'm given to understand from The Wire) totally unsupervised but at the same time believes that she can magic up a mommy (or Santa, incidentally) through the Power of Wishes and Good Thoughts. Now, this is probably a sad commentary of the state of childhood, but there are zero 8-year-olds who believe in Santa anymore. The kid partakes in some sort of elaborate con* with the help of several other adults to get her father to move to Baltimore to find his One True Love.
Are you still with me? No? It's doesn't really matter.
In the end, the mood set by the psychic stuff is so unbelievable and silly that your grip on reality is relatively looser here than in other books thereby allowing you to swallow some of the other absurdities with less difficulty.
Not a re-read but an ok little time-pass book if you need to change it up.
*Kids perpetrating cons to get their parents to Believe is a standard romantic comedy/romance novel device - remember little Jonah in Sleepless in Seattle? - and is usually quite cute. Most of the time, I enjoy a little quirkiness in romance novels/movies. Here however, I think the sheer number of zany themes were the tipping point that made this particular book unmanageable for me - starting with the psychic stuff and ending with the stuff with the kid and how she becomes pen pals with some lady in Baltimore and then starts calling this stranger "Grandma." In what alternate universe would this fly?
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