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De Zomer Aan Het Meer (2014)

by Erica James(Favorite Author)

4.02 of 5 Votes: 1

languge

English

genre

Romance

publisher

De Fontein

review 1: some moments last a lifetime floriana gets knocked down when her mind is on other things - she has received an invite from seb, her ex friend/boy(friend) to his wedding. she has not heard from him for 2 years her saviours come in the form of adam, who's girlfriend has just left him and esme an octogenarian spinster so begins a wonderful relationship which is further cemented when it transpires the wedding is to be held at lake como - where esme met the man of her dreams! how will it all end, especially when seb appears to get cold feet? ok u know who will end with whom but what unravels makes for excellent reading great names for wonderful characters and also the depiction of oxford and italy.the only thing that spoilt it for me was i would prefer more dialogue bev p.s, oc... moretogenarians do not pay for a tv licence !
review 2: What a TERRIBLE book! I seriously did not even finish reading this book, because it took me for ever to get to page 300. And I stopped there. I couldn't take it anymore. I do not understand why this book gets such raving reviews. It's badly written, the story is something a 16-year-old makes up when giving writing a go and the characters are too stereo-typical, even for a chicklit novel.Okay. So. Let's put a bit more structure in my critique.First off: I don't have a thing against chicklit. I like chicklit. And I know that chicklit is easy reading, no deep stuff, and that the first male and female character you encounter are the ones who end up together. And if there has to be an old lady involved, then OF COURSE she is the first one to notice the attraction and do some match making. Up to that point, I got the book, even if the meeting of these three persons was already a bit too silly. But then, this book also wants to be clever. It's like the book is telling you: look at me, I'm a silly romance but I'm randomly throwing words at you like "ignominy" and "surreptitiously" (there were worse ones, but I can't seem to find them anymore :P). As if James was trying to lift the book out of its silly-romance-genre, but throwing a few posh words in doesn't work.Secondly, what bothered me more was the storytelling. For example: *spoiler* At some point Floriana is riding her bike to work when she remembers Seb just called. Fine. Then she thinks about how Seb called her a week earlier, when she agreed to come to his wedding. Okay. They had this little conversation about how she has to try not to laugh when seeing him in a tuxedo, he remarks that she has seen him in worse states. THEN we go way back to when Seb apparently was on drugs and tried to throw himself off a bridge. I'm sorry. Wasn't Floriana just on her bike remembering to return a phonecall to Seb later that evening?And the book is filled with these weird bridges. It's always this: we are at one point in time, someone remembers a thing said or done a week earlier which suddenly means we have an entire chapter about something that happened ten years earlier.And then I haven't even mentioned the fact that somewhere in the middle of the book the entire story is forgotten, and we have to read the enormously cliched juvenile romance of Esme. If you want to write a cliched juvenile romance in 1960's Italy and then have that character go back there when she's 80, fine. But don't throw it into another romance where the romance is actually about the old woman's friends, for peaches sake!THIRDLY! The characters in this novel are as flat as they can be. Just giving us facts and stories about things that happened in their past does not give them proper depth. Floriana is apparently a happy-go-lucky kind of gal, but honestly, I never got that from her. Adam is a serious, heart-broken loner, but he knows loads of people who always help him out, and besides, hes's just a bore. And Esme is a stick-your-nose-in old biddy, despite the THOUSANDS of times it being denied in this book. Seb is the idiot who rejected Floriana and then finally, after two years and on his wedding day realises his mistake (I didn't even read that part, just a few sentences while skipping ahead, and HEY what a surprise). Jesse is the girl-from-hell (and exactly the same as Imogen, Seb's fiancee) and seeing the way Adam is, why the hell were they ever a couple. Just so she could be the reason for Adam to have a 'broken heart', that's why.And Lord, the characters in ancient Italy were even worse! Marco the perfect guy who was an impossible love because he wanted to be a priest. Angelo the loverboy. The household staff being typical household staff. The woman “in love” with Esme's father.So no, even for a summer read, “Summer at the Lake” is a horrible book. Terribly written and completely non-engaging characters. I tried and I tried, but I really couldn't finish this book. Horrible. Not even worth a star, but then my rating wouldn't show, mehehe :P less

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