Book twenty-three: Serendipity

Serendipity* (2007)
Melanie La’Brooy

Rating: 3.5/5

I sort-of liked her first book, liked her second, and really liked this. I guess this means I might sort-of love her next, and we can work our way up from there?

This book was filled with witty dialogue and lovable characters. The only thing that stopped it from being better was the sterotypicalness (not a word, but try and stay with me) of the two main male characters.

On the one hand you had Oscar: charming, whimsical, funny, loving, and seemingly carefree. The other, Pelham: snobbish, stuffy, annoying, censoring, and boring.

Obviously, the main point of the plot was for the main character, Hero, to choose between the two.

Ummm… this would have worked much better if the choice was harder. I don’t like when the author makes it easy for themselves by making the character’s choice so obvious. It’s annoying.

There were some back stories that explained why the characters made the decisions they did, and there was some attempts by La’Brooy to show that Pelham wasn’t that bad, it was just his relationship with Hero that bought out these bad characteristic. But I think that giving a character only bad characteristics through the eyes of the person who is supposedly in love, makes it seem highly unrealistic that they would stay with them.

Okay, sure, people stay with people they don’t love all the time in real life, I just think that when the plot of a book is about choosing between two people, you have to make that choice a little harder or the effort of reading about it seems wasted.

I know it is unlikely (and probably would have been dissatisfying) if La’Brooy had gone against the stereotype and had Hero make the unobvious choice at the end, but I would have liked it to have been a little harder for her to chose.

Also, Oscar seemed a bit too naive to live at times in the first half of the book, but he does toughen up towards the end.

Overall, the book is saved by the dialogue. It had me laughing out loud more than once, and come on, any book with a singing telegram dressed as a gorilla, has to be good, right?

This book is also very pretty on the inside. It has a really nice type setting or whatever that is called. It is very easy to read - espcially after the dark, smugy, teeny tiny print of some of the books I have read lately. Although the type of book that leaves ink on your fingers is usually half the price of a pretty one like this, so I guess its to be expected.

On a completely unrelated note, I am very annoyed that going back to work has reduced my book consumption from an average of two a day, to two a week. If only I didn’t need my pay to buy the books, I would do away with the job and concentrate on the reading.

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* Finished on Tuesday, 3rd April.