4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
I want those hours of my life back...., February 19, 2011
I don't understand how the author of this book is a Sunday Times Best Selling Author. This is the first book I've read by Ms. Lewis and based on how poorly written it is, how unnecessarily long it is, how terrible the characters are, this is also the last book I will read by Ms. Lewis.
For one, the style of writing is riddled with clichés. Sentences are awkwardly worded, dialogue is a disaster. And by disaster, I mean everyone speaks in exactly the same way. Everyone speaks like no real person would speak. While I was reading, I could not believe the book was written by anyone other than a novice. That's how bad the writing was.
Then the characters. There's a group of friends in the book: Nikki, Spencer, Kristin, David, and Danny. Of the three boys, during the span of over 500 pages, I could not find any action, or personality to differentiate between them. They speak the same way and react the same way. If one was so inclined, it would be unrecognizable if every time Danny said something, you changed Danny's name to David. Or Spencer. Or Kristin. You get the picture.
There is no characterization. Who are these people? Why should we care about them? Why do they do the things they do? None of these questions are answered. To be fair, we do get background stories for each character. But really, what happened to meeting the characters?
Moving on to the main character, Nikki. The entire premise of the story revolves around her getting pregnant at 21 and the wonderful bond she shares with her son. Again, really? A girl gets pregnant at 21 by accident, and her entire life gets disrupted, and her parents are unsupportive... and she is exuberant. Why? As an 18-year-old girl, I can honestly say that if I was unexpectedly pregnant, I would be terrified. How can someone not be? And I'm not saying that she can't be happy about the pregnancy; I'm saying why, as the reader, am I not made to understand her joy?
Which brings me to Nikki's general reaction to everything that happens to her. I can understand suspending belief, but nothing that Nikki does is believable. (SPOILERS) Her son dies, and she finds out that her father is the one that killed him and what does Nikki do? She takes the fall for it. Even after spending over 500 pages with Nikki, I didn't get anything she did.
More SPOILERS:
Moving on to plot. The author tries, and fails, to string together a series of incredibly unbelievable plot lines. Nikki's son Zach has Tay Sachs disease. A disease I might add that is prevalent in the Jewish population. Here's the thing, though, Nikki isn't Jewish and neither is her boyfriend. BUT, in like less than five pages, we find out Nikki's dad isn't really her dad. And that the guy she thought was her dad actually killed her biological, and Jewish, dad. Confusing, right? I believe Ms. Lewis was trying to be clever when she sprung this out of the blue on us. Yeah, Ms. Lewis, you would have been clever if the way you'd revealed this minor detail was even slightly plausible.
It should be obvious by now that I hated this book. The only reason I even bothered to finish the mess of a thing was because I was on a sixteen-hour flight and had nothing else to read. There were some potentially awesome plot lines but the author failed to use them. In the hands of a more accomplished writer, this book could have been a masterpiece. Not the waste of time it was.
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