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The Secret SisterIntroduction of the ebook: The Secret Sister
Đánh giá : 4.01 /5 (sao)
Did she once have a sister? Has her mother lied all these years? Why?
After a painful divorce, Maisey Lazarow returns to Fairham, the small island off the North Carolina coast where she grew up. She goes there to heal—and to help her brother, Keith, a deeply troubled man who’s asked her to come home. But she refuses to stay in the family house. The last person she wants to Did she once have a sister? Has her mother lied all these years? Why?
After a painful divorce, Maisey Lazarow returns to Fairham, the small island off the North Carolina coast where she grew up. She goes there to heal—and to help her brother, Keith, a deeply troubled man who’s asked her to come home. But she refuses to stay in the family house. The last person she wants to see is the wealthy, controlling mother she escaped years ago.
Instead, she finds herself living next door to someone else she’d prefer to avoid—Rafe Romero, the wild, reckless boy to whom she lost her virginity at sixteen. He’s back on the island, and to her surprise, he’s raising a young daughter alone. Maisey’s still attracted to him, but her heart’s too broken to risk…
Then something even more disturbing happens. She discovers a box of photographs that evoke distant memories of a little girl, a child Keith remembers, too. Maisey believes the girl must’ve been their sister, but their mother claims there was no sister.
Maisey’s convinced that child existed. So where is she now? …more
Review ebook The Secret Sister
This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. Be warned, this book is neither a romance nor a romance-suspense, despite its being marketed as such and the author’s specialisation in the genre. It all reads like a very boring report on some vaguely delineated dysfunctional family and ends with a hastily tied pink ribbon around it without ever addressing the million gaping plot holes crying to be addressed. It is, in short, a tepid mess of a book that should have never been published, at least in its present form.
For the life of me, I could Be warned, this book is neither a romance nor a romance-suspense, despite its being marketed as such and the author’s specialisation in the genre. It all reads like a very boring report on some vaguely delineated dysfunctional family and ends with a hastily tied pink ribbon around it without ever addressing the million gaping plot holes crying to be addressed. It is, in short, a tepid mess of a book that should have never been published, at least in its present form.
For the life of me, I could not find any reason why the main couple is together, could not find any reason what these two were doing being the main characters in a romance. I could not even believe that these could ever find each other remotely interesting. At best, they could be a one night stand that ended the morning after without the exchange of phone numbers. As it is neither the writer nor the reader knows what to do with these two. Sensing that they had zero chemistry, attraction or basic curiosity about each other, Brenda Novak found it impossible to build a love story around them, let alone a passionate one, and ended up writing a bewilderingly uninteresting, unatractive (in terms of the rapport between them) couple who no one in their right mind could ever find believable.
As if that was not enough, there’s also a lamentable and asinine attempt at a triangle with the heroine’s ex-husband, who comes in and goes straight out of the plot without any purpose other than exposing the heroine as the titanic fool she is. Neither entrance nor exit of her ex made any sense and the whole thing is not only an exercise in aimless, meandering storyline but also an insult to common sense. For, other than wasting a couple of chapters, what is the point in allowing a man who did not support you in your most soul-destroying grief, who left you for another woman and took you to the cleaners in the divorce settlement back into your life? This sorry excuse of a man (and the worst betrayal was not the other woman but the emotional abandonment at the worst possible time for the heroine) is portrayed as enjoying the heroine’s trust! She confides in and confesses everything to him, while she refuses to share anything with the saintly hero. Not only does she not share anything with the latter but she also constantly doubts him, lies to him and misleads him. At every effing opportunity. So even if you survive the aimless plot, the nonsensical heroine most definitely will finish you off.
I’ve come to loathe the kind of writing that uses difficult circumstances as a way to excuse its own inability to write an interesting character, and this book is a prime example of this. Everything and the kitchen sink is thrown into the plot, a disabled child, a deceased child, a traumatic past, a traumatic present, etc.. Everything is treated as just an item on a list, a list put together in the most formulaic manner without generating anything remotely poignant or moving. The hero, Rafe, never escapes the excess sugar with which his writer coats him, rendering him completely unconvincing (and although I’m certain quite a few romance readers don’t mind unconvincing, yours truly needs a convincing hero in order to believe he is some ‘dream man’). This abstraction with muscle and a penis won’t do. Nothing about him spells ‘character’, let alone one that we would be interested reading about. He, supposedly, is a single dad of a special needs daughter, but you never see or sense any of the everyday life difficulties this entails. He, supposedly, is a builder with a small business that is struggling to get off the ground, but nothing about him says ‘ working class’ (writers in this genre write about working class people as if the latter lead comfortable lives; their only difference from the standard -and loathsome to me- romance billionaire is the absence of references to private jets and penthouses). Do us all a favour, romance writers, and look around you to see how a real life Rafe would have coped without state support, and if you cannot do that then leave the whole theme alone and go write yet another one of those awful, dull, bondage loving billionaires you so like to write about. As for the child in this story is, as you’d expect, your super formulaic cutie who takes immediately to the heroine and wants her to be her mummy and desires nothing more than see her move in with her dad, immediately, right now! In this book everything must be buried under mountains of super-affirmative crap.
As for the ending, which is one of the most ridiculous endings I’ve ever read (regarding the sister of the title), I challenge you to try and read through it without pulling your hair out (and not lament the money you wasted on it) And as if the whole sister palaver did not prove to be one big crappy ploy to infuse this poor excuse of a book with supposed ‘suspense’, the writer goes on and bombards you with the most hastily concocted and unbelievable HEA that you are ever likely to come across. After completely neglecting to develop the romance side for the entirety of the book, and with only 7 pages to go, that dodo of a heroine still thinks, for the hundredth time, of leaving the hero (!!!). And then 6 pages from the end, she joins the hero in planning their wedding, the wedding of the century! Yes, one moment she is not sure whether she wants to be in the same State as the hero and the next she is transformed into one of the good wives of Weinsberg, with whom the hero comes to form the most lovey-dovey couple ever to walk this effing earth.
A piece of advice, be smarter than me and give this a wide, a very wide berth. …more
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