Thursday, December 22, 2011

Love Blooms in Winter [Review]

Title: Love Blooms in Winter
Author: Lori Capeland
Labels: Fiction | Romance | Historical
Publisher: Harvest House Publishers
Publication Date: January 1, 2012
Contains: N/A
Buy It: Amazon | Book Depository | The Publisher

My Rating: 
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Blurb: 1892Mae Wilkey's sweet next-door neighbor, Pauline, is suffering from old age and dementia and desperately needs family to come help her. But Pauline can't recall having kin remaining. Mae searches through her desk and finds a name—Tom Curtis, who may just be the answer to their prayers.
          Tom can't remember an old aunt named Pauline, but if she thinks he's a long-lost nephew, he very well may be. After two desperate letters from Mae, he decides to pay a visit. An engagement, a runaway train, and a town of quirky, loveable people make for more of an adventure than Tom is expecting. But it is amazing what can bloom in winter when God is in charge of things. [Taken from Goodreads]
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          Love Blooms in Winter is not exactly what I would call the best book I've ever read. Yeah, I know, terrible way to start off a review, right? While it wasn't all bad, this book failed to capture and maintain my interest and attention. Plot itself was alright, but the characters kept making me want to bang my head against a wall.

          Let's start with one of the main characters, Mae Wilkey. She's a sweet girl born and raised in the small town of Dwadlo, but inconveniently has to take care of an elderly woman, Pauline, who has no family. She's also got this chump beau that had been courting her for forever but won't seal the deal with an engagement. Enter Jake, Mae Wilkey's beau. Why is he such a chump, you ask? Personally, I found him to be ridiculously stuck up and annoying as I'll get out. The more I realized the kind of person this Jake was, the more I lost respect for Mae and her willingness to put up with his garbage. 

          Then Tom Curtis came along. Now this guy I liked. Mae finds his name in Pauline's desk and automatically decides he must be kin. Reasonable assumption. But the poor guy gets dragged out the North Dakota to take care of the kin he's never met, gets the joy of falling in love with a great girl who just so happens be having a repeated brain fail as she continues to stick with her jerk of a beau. I felt really bad for him, but he did keep the book alive enough for me to keep ploughing through. The only other character that really struck my interest was Pauline. She was just...hilarious. She was probably my favorite character.

          The other thing that bothered me was random things that seemed totally out of place. (Due note, I read an advanced galley of this book, so hopefully the lines will be tweaked before the book comes out on January 1, 2012.) For instance, at the beginning there was a dating reference. Now, I'm not entirely sure exactly when the term "dating" really started to be used, but in the time period that this book is set in it felt totally out of place. Plus, it was never mentioned again, and instead the term "courting" was used. There was one other phrase that made me want to do a face-desk, too: "He was so...Tom." It immediately made me think of something I would expect to read in some vampire book (don't know why that came to me)...vampire books that I do not care for.

          As much as I hate giving downer reviews, I honestly didn't really like this book. It didn't draw me in, didn't hold my interest, and half the time I wanted to strangle one or more of the characters. Events that seemed random and out of place killed what might have saved this book for me.

          I received an advanced galley for free from the publisher through netgalley for this review. These opinions are my own; I was not required to write a positive review, nor was I compensated for this review.

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