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Kind Van Haar Vader (2012)

by Erica James(Favorite Author)

3.71 of 5 Votes: 1

ISBN

9032512935 (ISBN13: 9789032512934)

languge

English

genre

Romance

publisher

De Kern

review 1: Katie Lavender is having a bad day; her boyfriend is a pain, she just lost her job, and a lawyer just told her that her mother had an affair thirty years ago producing her, and the father she never met has set up a trust fund for her that contains hundreds of thousands of dollars. All right, that last bit may not be a bad part, but it`s still rather disconcerting. Yes, Katie Lavender has just found out she`s a member of the elite, with her rich father, Stirling Nightingale (I still can`t decide whether that`s an awesome name, ridiculous name, or both). But Stirling is having problems of his own--his wife is understandably not on board with the 30 year old affair, and Katie's half-siblings are taking her side; his brother has just committed suicide, and plunged the family b... moreusiness into scandal. Can Katie find a place in her new family? And gosh, that totally adopted new cousin of hers looks really good. I read a lot of genre books, but mostly fantasy and sci-fi; I read so much of them, in fact, that their genre conventions often go over my head. Perhaps it's my lack of familiarity with written romances that made the conventions here really stand out--I think it was the moment where Katie, through a comical/eye-rolling series of events finds herself accidentally catering her new grandmother's birthday when I realized we were heavily in rom-com territory. That in itself isn't a bad thing; yes, the book is heavily sentimental, but sometimes, such as Stirling's rock-bottom breakdown, some sentiment doesn't go amiss. Although sometimes, it really, really misses the mark. About half-way through the book, I nearly stopped reading--and I'm not the only one, judging from the reviews. At that point, about half the family is on Katie's side, and the other half are portrayed as supervillains who would be twirling mustaches if they could ever find the time to stop stroking the cats on their laps in menacing manners. There's a lot of tension in the situation James created, but she amps it up to ridiculous melodrama, to the point where you're reasonably sure it'll all work out, but the obstacles are so artificial and the "good guys" so over-the-top saintly that you just don't care. Luckily, the book begins to turn a bit, but even then, some of the "villain" turns are so abrupt that it overplays the book's hand--we see that this isn't really a story about real characters, but a bunch of stock figures that respond to situations as the plot demands them to. Her half-siblings forgive her not because they've done deep soul-searching, but because it's time for them to forgive her, that sort of thing. More damning, Katie, our supposed POV character, never really has a climax--the story's resolution comes about largely through her inaction, which is more than a little disappointing. I'm not going to fault the book for being manipulative, as that sort of manipulation is kind of the point of genre fiction. But I will blame it for being too visible in its manipulation, too obvious in its contrivances. (Also, I kind of felt sorry for Gina at the end, because "evil step-mother" is a horrible typecast, even for a fictional being.)
review 2: I enjoyed this, despite the sad topics of death (including suicide), loveless marriages and lies. I thought it was very sensitive to the idea of coming to terms with loss, and to judging a whole person's life, not just one action.The characters were very simply defined as good-guys or bad-guys (Gina, Rosco and Scarlet were all pretty vile really, despite their saintly turn-arounds at the end); and lots of it didn't add up - why did Neil need to steal so much money when his brother could easily afford to make it up?. And oh my the names are hilarious. Stirling Nightingale - really!?I'd be interested to read what happens to them all next. less

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