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lauren_k_elizabeth 's review for:
Island Affair
by Priscilla Oliveras
I won this book through a Goodreads giveaway and was super excited to have gotten it and start reading it. It's an uncorrected ARC (hence the occasional typo I spotted) but that didn't really have any bearing on the book itself.
It was good. It was okay. I'd give it somewhere between 3.5-4 stars overall. The writing was good, I like the characters, but something about it at the end just felt...unfinished? I mean (spoilers) it has the HEA you would expect from a romance like this, but I felt like it barely scraped the top off the more salient plot points:
-Luis's forced time off was barely addressed
-Sara and Robin had one in depth conversation and that was apparently enough?
-Same for Luis and Enrique
I generally finished it feeling like there could have been more depth. I enjoyed reading it - at no point did I consider DNF-ing it - but I also wasn't like "holy crap I can't put this down, I have to know what happens next!"
Also, and this is just a personal thing for me, the writer is really good but OMG does she love her metaphors and extended analogies. A couple of them were good here and there, but we're talking three a page sometimes.
--"...had the questions melting on the tip of his tongue like the cotton candy he'd bought his nephew at Children's Day..."
--"...like the sun peeking its hello across the sky when he was out for an early morning run."
--"damn if he didn't feel like a red snapper caught on the end of her fishing pole. Only, fool that he might be, he wasn't squirming to be released."
I realize those are similes, but they're all from a page and a half range, and it's like that the whole time.
The colloquial Spanish was nice. I'm not a native speaker myself, but I'm familiar enough with it that I could tell it sounded the same as my Mexican & Panamanian in-laws do when they're talking/interacting/what-have-you.
Overall this was a good book, I enjoyed it and found the chemistry between Sara and Luis believable and enjoyable, but it didn't blow me away.
3.5-4 stars
It was good. It was okay. I'd give it somewhere between 3.5-4 stars overall. The writing was good, I like the characters, but something about it at the end just felt...unfinished? I mean (spoilers) it has the HEA you would expect from a romance like this, but I felt like it barely scraped the top off the more salient plot points:
-Luis's forced time off was barely addressed
-Sara and Robin had one in depth conversation and that was apparently enough?
-Same for Luis and Enrique
I generally finished it feeling like there could have been more depth. I enjoyed reading it - at no point did I consider DNF-ing it - but I also wasn't like "holy crap I can't put this down, I have to know what happens next!"
Also, and this is just a personal thing for me, the writer is really good but OMG does she love her metaphors and extended analogies. A couple of them were good here and there, but we're talking three a page sometimes.
--"...had the questions melting on the tip of his tongue like the cotton candy he'd bought his nephew at Children's Day..."
--"...like the sun peeking its hello across the sky when he was out for an early morning run."
--"damn if he didn't feel like a red snapper caught on the end of her fishing pole. Only, fool that he might be, he wasn't squirming to be released."
I realize those are similes, but they're all from a page and a half range, and it's like that the whole time.
The colloquial Spanish was nice. I'm not a native speaker myself, but I'm familiar enough with it that I could tell it sounded the same as my Mexican & Panamanian in-laws do when they're talking/interacting/what-have-you.
Overall this was a good book, I enjoyed it and found the chemistry between Sara and Luis believable and enjoyable, but it didn't blow me away.
3.5-4 stars