I guess I either have unbelievably high standards or I'm just a magnet for good plot ideas that go nowhere. This one, my friends, I'm sorry to say, is another disappointment.... And yet, the blurb made it sound so promising....
In Love With a Haunted House is about a woman named Mallory who lives in Chicago with her fiance Jim. He dumps her, she gets laid off, and so she moves back home to somewhere around Atlanta. Her mother tells her that the beautiful Victorian home next door is for sale, since the ancient and elusive Ms. Lewis has passed away. Mallory hopes to purchase and restore the house despite the rumors that it is haunted. (Sounds pretty good so far, right?)
When Mallory arrives at her mother's house, she runs into the ruggedly handsome Blake standing outside, eyeing the Lewis place. She soon finds out that he also wants to purchase the home. When we are introduced to Blake's cousin, Lonnie, who wants to sell the house (here it starts to get a little complicated--Blake is Ms. Lewis's grandson from the baby she had in secret and gave to her dead boyfriend's parents to raise during World War II, and he knows it and Lonnie knows it, but other people don't know it, for some reason....) we start to realize the direction this story is going in. That's right--Blake and Mallory are going to have to team up to defeat the sinister Lonnie. And what's the best way to do that? To buy the house together.
But, you may ask, who would want to live with a stranger?
Don't worry! Mallory and Blake fell deeply in love sometime between a ghost in the old house throwing Blake in a closet, drinking coffee, and making out at her mom's house. It's perfectly normal! After all, she broke up with her fiance a few weeks before this. It happens all the time! So, you may be thinking that there will be wedding bells in the future (winky-eye emoji-con) we'll have to wait and see!
I really don't want to ruin this for anyone who has a couple of spare hours on their hands and likes really silly ghosts, really quick romances, and really poorly written books, so I'm not going to tell you anything else about the plot line. Besides, you've all figured it out already any way, right? But I am going to tell you that once the ghost of Ms. Lewis gets a hold of Lonnie, the story goes into fast forward mode. It's as if the writer was given two days to write this book, and she looked up on the evening of the second day and was only about halfway through, so she dumped a bunch of words on the page. We fly through the rest of the book and skip over some of what could have been the best parts, like, I don't know, the wedding!
I wish that these were the only issues with the book, but they're not. The characters are very flat, and if you like to read books where you pick up subtle details about the characters from the things they do, this is not the book for you. Everything about them is very straight forward. We can see into their minds and we know what they are thinking and why they are doing the things they are doing. It's very annoying at times. Also, the backstories for all of the main characters are not well developed at all, especially for Ms. Lewis and her boyfriend. The story says they never left each other's sight after they met, but then he had to sneak off of base to see her. Huh? Blake consistently refers to both Ms. Lewis and the woman who raised Ms. Lewis's baby--his father's grandmother--as his grandmother. Well, technically, the second lady is his great-grandmother. And even Lonnie calls her "Grandma Lewis" when she would have been his aunt or cousin. I'm really not sure which because none of this story is developed well enough to be able to tell.
Not only is this book in desperate need of an editor, someone to go in and help the author take these great ideas and formulate them into a nice, well-thought out story, it also needs a good proofreader. I understand that in all manuscripts there are occasionally going to be errors. Some of these are blatant. It's almost like the author was using speech-to-text and didn't go back and read it when she was done. At all. Not even once. And that no one read it for her either. Her are some examples:
"'Who wish she would have a child with anyway?'"
"Mallory through her hands up in the air."
This isn't grammatically incorrect, but check out this sentence. "'I'm not sure what you mean.'" Mallory wasn't sure what he meant, how could they share the house?" Not only is this a sentence only Captain Obvious could love, but there is also a comma splice--one of about a billion in the story. Even the first sentence of the story has a comma splice in it. For realzies.
"The comforter on her bed had a stained from the night she had drawn a slumber party..." What does that even mean?
Maybe this one is on me. I tried to figure out what it meant. I even Googled it. Any ideas? "He would know how to stint if you gave him a manual and explained it to him." What is stinting? Someone please explain it to me....
"How could anyone stand a cell something so beautiful..."
This one makes me think Mallory is actually a zombie. "She moved a little bit closer, so close that he could smell her sweet perfume and see the small dab of jelly on one corner of her mouth from the toe she had been eating for breakfast." Yuck!
"Jim's cold eyes took in her be dry gold appearance..." Does Rumpelstiltskin know about this?
Look, I'm the first to admit I have a hard time with words that sound the same but are spelled differently. If you've been reading my blog for a while, you've probably seen me do this from time to time. And, no, no one proof reads my blog before I publish it except for me. But I'm not attempting to sell my blog to people for their hard-earned money either. And, for the love of monkeys, if you ever see errors as egregious as these in my writing, please let me know!
I know that Ms. Goldman has written lots of books, and that many of them appear to be doing well. In fact, this book has a lot of positive four and five star reviews. So I guess some people enjoy this sort of fast pace story and didn't mind the errors. I am not one of those people. I had to give it a sad little two stars. I did like the premise. And that's where I must leave you, Ms. Goldman. To read my review on Amazon, click here. If you'd like to try this one on for size, you can find it here. The price is currently $2.99 and as I am writing this, it is in the Amazon top 10,000 for Kindle books, which is amazing and something to be proud of. Bez tuf luk, Ms. Goldman!
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