Customer Reviews

The Big 5-OH!

5 star:		(27)
4 star:		(26)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

Olivia Wallace is nearing a landmark birthday--the trouble is that all her birthdays have been bad luck. There was the year her boyfriend was caught making out with another girl at Olivia's birthday party, the year her husband died, the year she had a broken leg, and the list could go on.

This year, Liv's best friend decides to help Liv escape the doldrums of the Ohio winter, and sends her down to Florida to house-sit her mother's house. On the flight down, Liv meets handsome passenger, Jared Hunt, and is stunned to discover Jared is her next door neighbor in Florida. But then Jared's twenty-five year old son decides to pursue Liv. Liv is flattered, but not interested in a boy half her age. Nor is she interested in the flirtatious octogenarian chasing her.

Jared Hunt's wife died from cancer several years back, and he has never found another woman who measured up to her until Liv catches his eye. Liv keeps him laughing with her actions, but is there anyway that he can convince her to pull up roots and settle in Florida?

THE BIG 5-OH! is an adorable story that will keep your interest from page one. Liv is a realistic heroine who has a rough road, including a bout with cancer, including radiation and chemo. Cancer survivors will relate, especially with how unattractive Liv feels after having gone through that ordeal.

Add a dog with a lampshade collar, a rogue alligator, and a crazy cast of characters and you have a story that will keep you laughing. Ms. Bricker definitely knows how to write a romance that will have you laughing out loud while cheering the characters on. Don't miss THE BIG 5-OH! Discussion questions are included at the end of the book.

Ever have a bad day and pick up a novel, hoping for escape? That's what happened with me while I was reading Sandra's book "The Big 5-Oh!" Let's start at the beginning. This is the second Sandra Bricker novel I've read. The first was her fantastic "Love Finds You in Snowball, Arkansas" (Summerside Press). (Check the archives of Net's Book Notes for my review in 2008: w[...])

Sandra's books are fun. While reading The Big 5-Oh! I recall laughing aloud when I was in no mood to laugh! That's what good fiction does--takes you away from your circumstances and lets you enjoy yourself. She made me enjoy myself even against my will. (Thanks, Sandie!) I appreciated one of her themes--that even tough circumstances can be used by God as He works behind the scenes in our lives.

There is a shortage (in my opinion) of romantic comedies. Sandie's books help fill the void. Readers of any age will enjoy this book.

Although I passed the "Big 5-0" several years ago, this book touched my heart as I'm sure it will ladies of any age. I also loved the main setting--Captiva, Florida, one of our favorite places to vacation. An added bonus was reading about the various familiar sites and restaurants and the key lime pie! Makes me hungry for a slice just to type it.

Widow Olivia Wallace dreads her upcoming 50th birthday, but not for the usual reasons. She has a string of bad memories associated with birthdays. Her next-door neighbor and her neighbor's mom who lives in Sanibel, work it out for Olivia to dog-sit the mom's beloved Boofer (a character in himself!) while the mom visits her daughter.

While there, Olivia meets two men, a father and son who both seem to fall for her. She doesn't want to imagine what can go wrong on this birthday! Order the book and find out!

Pros: This book was free.
Cons: Everything else - plus I cannot get the four hours of my life back reading this dribble.

I've never written a book review before on Amazon.com. However the quality of this book and the reviews for it (@time of writing 4.5 stars) are so completely incongruous, I can't help but make some comments.

This book was offered free through Kindle which was a good thing because it would be a shame to kill a tree for this monumental pile of doggy-doo-doo (to put it politely).

The simple plot: sexy middle aged nurse who is a cancer survivor meets sexy middle aged doctor on a vacation and they fall in love. Throw in some supposedly humorous situations (farting dog.... ha ha), a lot of praying, and that's it.

As a novel, it is offensive in multiple ways: both the main characters are annoyingly ``perfect`` to the point that they are unbelievable (ie, insecure ridiculous(ahhh... I am dying because I have leg cramps) redhead who gets hit on by multiple men through out the novel including the son of the male protagonist who is in his 20s...oh please!), they are supposed to be health care professionals but don`t act like it at all (doctor travelling to see a patient while bringing his girlfriend along... nurses becoming a receptionist... all the sudden change jobs from being an OR nurse to pediatric clinic without any additional training... hello! this does not happen!), the use of deux ex machina one too many times to resolve problems (oh we don`t live in the same city... well, let`s just randomly find a job for you out of the blue even though you do not have the appropriate qualifications!).

Emotionally, this one left me stone cold. Too bad Amazon doesn`t let their customers give zero stars.

I was disappointed in this book.

The book is mainly set on Sanibel Island, which is in southwest Florida, not central Florida. Okay, we'll overlook that mistake.

There is another book available on Amazon entitled The Big 5-0. Why not choose an original title?

Each chapter began with an excerpt from a boring children's book that had been written by one of the minor characters. Those excerpts were assinine and did not add to the story at all. The purported publisher must have been brain dead.

The main character was an O.R. nurse. That being the case, why didn't she know how to deal with a leg cramp? Why was she devoid of common sense? Why did she so often say things that made her sound dumb and weak?

This book was set in the modern day, yet the weather was not forecast? No one in the book dealt with the storm-related problems that came up in a reasonable or responsible manner. The characters who were involved in the tropical storm scenes were all medical professionals -- you'd think they would have a clue, some common sense, some knowledge about how to deal with these issues. The doctor's nurse drives what's her name home during a tropical storm. Then she refuses to stay, but gets to anyway, because she doesn't live far away. Dangerous weather, yet 5 miles isn't too far to drive in it. Where is the common sense, particularly of someone who is from the area?

Writing about this book makes me think about it, which is getting tiresome. If I'm too specific, it will ruin the book for those who may enjoy it more than I did. Suffice it to say that the dog scenes did not, in the main, amuse me, and one of the major ones was not believable either.

You know, it could be edited and rewritten to be a fairly good story. A little depth and some I.Q. points added to the characters, predictability squelched in a few areas to add interest, getting rid of that donkey story, reworking a few scenes so common sense carries the day, less serendipity ....

As I'm turning the big 5-0 next year, I thought this would be a bit of fun to read. I didn't expect literary brilliance, so I definitely wasn't disappointed, but The Big 5-Oh! is very clichéd, totally predictable and completely unbelievable. Even so, it's a nice enough story of love for the second time around. Just suspend all critical thinking and you'll probably enjoy it as a bit of diversionary, if completely forgettable, fun.

But if you are looking for a page turner, this isn't it. In fact, I came close to throwing it against the wall at one point when a tired old joke was used as part of the story line (replace a dead rabbit with a dead cat and you've got it). The only thing that stopped me was that I was reading this on my Kindle. Seriously, shame on the author for trying to pull that on the reader. If I'd been editing this, that would have been the first thing I pulled her up on. The fact she used this old joke just added to the general feeling that this was a very stale read.

I am a Christian, so the fact that it was a Christian romance wasn't a negative factor.

So, overall, if you are in the mood for a bit of predictable, unbelievable fluff, this may fit the bill. If you are looking for something fresh, then keep on looking.

i read 3 chapters and deleted it from my kindle. chock-full of cliches and stupid coincidences. wanted to rate it 0 stars, but amazon forces at least 1 star.

i got it free. that's the best i can say about it.

This book was terrible, and although I'm glad it was free when I picked it up, I'm still annoyed that I wasted so much time reading it.

The plot is boring and predictable, and the main character is weak and unlikeable. The chapter openings with Prudence the Donkey's little life lessons were annoying at best, and while I didn't know the book was Christian fiction when I first received it, that became very obvious within the first few pages.

I wanted desperately to put The Big 5-OH! down after the first couple of chapters, but I refuse to review a book I haven't read in its entirety, so I slogged away at it - just so I could give this the single star it deserved, since I'd been grossly mislead by the 4.5 star average rating this book had when I picked it up. I am still shocked that so many people read and enjoyed this book.

BOTTOM LINE: I don't expect much from light fiction (especially free fiction!), but I certainly expected more than this.

The first third of the book was delightful! I was seriously enjoying the story and the writing. Then it started to get sloppy and overwritten. On one page, every single utterance was postulated, surmised, stated, commented or even nodded. (Really! Who nods words?) Then came the sudden injection of religion. If you enjoy Christian fiction, you might like this, but unfamiliar with the author, I hadn't realized that was what I was in for, and it was a turn-off.

But what really did the book in for me was one disaster after another without any sort of tie-in. It could've been a collection of short stories about the same characters. This is not a story. This is a list of this happened and then that happened and then this happened. A sudden hurricane with no warning? Give me a break! No one who's ever lived in FL would believe that. Every chapter's disaster was resolved in a couple of sentences within the same chapter. There was no build-up of any single plot element, except for one: two women fighting over the same guy. I gave up at about 47% because I wasn't invested in the story. I just skipped to the end and read the very predictable outcome.

I got this one for free, otherwise I would've given it 1 star.

Clearly the writer's main purpose for writing this book was Christian witness. Otherwise it might have been interesting to read. It was not a lack of sex that disappointed me. It was a lack of any surprises in the plot. Unfortunately the only clever episode was shamelessly appropriated from a well known urban legend that's at least two years older than this book. If you are looking for depth, skip this book.