Customer Reviews

The Arranged Marriage

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Young widow is invited by the matriarch of the well-known family of their Queensland town to audition some songs for a family wedding reception. She meets attractive Hero & his sophisticated fiancée, who scorns her career choices & her rambunctious 2yo son. Hero is struck by heroine's looks, voice, & love for her son and re-evaluates his future with his fiancée. Hero's fiancée fights hard to keep their marriage plans but Hero's grandmother is as determined to keep it from happening.

Not the best Darcy book nor is it the worst. Pacing & emotional involvement was ok. Sexual tension & sex scenes were fine. Hero & heroine's attraction to each other & acceptance of it was straightforward. The challenge to their romance was Hero's ambitious fiancée. The plot was predictable. Characters were likeable but not memorable. Heroine was a nice & simple Italian-Australian girl, willing to forego her career aspirations for marriage & children. She's had a crush on Hero for awhile & didn't resist his advances. She didn't even wonder about his engagement status until after they had sex. Hero didn't show that much strength or depth either. He was raised in their small Australian town & seemed to have gotten diverted by city life & people like his fiancée. Coming back home & meeting heroine seemed to bring him back to his childhood roots & values.

Recommended as an average romance.

The Arranged Marriage This was a cute story and it was romantic and real. The hero is engaged at the start of the story to a woman his grandmother feels is wrong for him. She proceeds to match make..enter the heroine--a singer and a widow with a small son. This story is very real life and I felt well done. Both hero and heroine had basic common sense and responded satisfactorily to the conflicts as they came up. there was also the element of 'being drawn to one another' -- as if soul mates. I'm giving it four stars however and not five because I felt there was too much of a tone of practicality in the writing style...I wanted a more powerful initial response coming from the hero AT THE GET GO--upon meeting the heroine! I felt his attraction was there...but subtle. For short romance novels we don't have the story length so I think it needed to be a more powerful first encounter...like time stops.

Synopsis:

Alex King (our hero) is the eldest grandson from a rich and prestigious family. He wants to marry and start a family and to that end, engaged himself to a beautiful and successful (shallow, selfish and conceited) woman. Alex's grandmother, the matriarch and head of the family, despises his choice of bride and sets out to find a replacement.

She finds the replacement in the form of Gina Terlizzi, a semi-impoverished widow and single mother who works in a flower shop and sings for weddings, etc to make extra money. The grandmother asks Gina to audition to sing at an upcoming wedding being held at her estate, aka a castle. She figures all she had to do is put Gina in the same vicinity as her grandson to make him see the differences in the 2 women to get him to realize he's making a huge mistake.

It works.

Gina and Alex are drawn to each other, and the juxtaposition between the warm, caring, big-hearted, mothering Gina and his self-centred, rude, vain, and obnoxious fiancee could not be more glaring. Alex dumps his fiancee, but in the heat of the moment, neglects to inform Gina that his wedding is off, and after a night of passion, she thinks she just had an affair with a man heading to the alter.

The drama builds from there.

*************The Take-Away*************

The characters were well-developed and very likeable, the storyline was cute, and there was enough drama to keep the book interesting.

A one star deduction, simply because the book should have ended with Gina and Alex's thoughts/conclusion and not the grandmother's glee over her matchmaking efforts. Otherwise, a thoroughly enjoyable read.