Dead Men Are Easy To Love [Kindle Edition]

Hillary Kanter (Author)

Book Description

Question: What do Clark Gable, Ernest Hemingway, and Vincent Van Gogh all have in common, besides being famous and dead?
Answer: They all loved Ariel Richards, a modern day time-traveling woman who visited with each of them in the past, and inspired some of the greatest works of their times.

For Ariel Richards, is there any future in the past?
One thing is for certain: She thinks dead men are much easier to love than living ones!

Ariel has bad luck with love. But her present dating woes are only the beginning. Soon she finds herself making mysterious visits to the past, brushing shoulders--and much more--with some of the most famous men, and bad boys, from history . . . Ernest Hemingway, Clark Gable, Beethoven, Dracula, Van Gogh, Butch Cassidy, and others. Will she find lasting romance with any one of them, or will it die before she can find hope for her future?

Product Details

• File Size: 308 KB
• Print Length: 173 pages
• Simultaneous Device Usage: Unlimited
• Publisher: Slightly Off Kanter Press; 240 pages, 1st edition (June 10, 2012)
• Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
• Language: English
• ASIN: B008AK7J60
• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
• X-Ray: Enabled
• Lending: Enabled
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #537,343 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 22 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Promising Premise - Poor Performance August 14, 2012

By Carrie J. Bylina

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

This book is breezy, sometimes funny, lacking depth, and thankfully short. Dead Men Are Easy To Love is a somewhat Sex In The City wannabe, borrowing the tone, journaling technique, and bit-sized love tryst formula from that show. In what was a promising premise and good start, it failed to find its own voice. Ariel Roberts finds no joy in the men she dates and finds little joy with life. Quite frankly, I'd run screaming away from her and her negative energy in realty. She lives pretty high on the hog for a constantly broke freelance journalist in New York City when a gypsy gives her a crystal, allowing Ariel to inadvertently time-travel and date the dreamy dead men in their prime while she looks for love.

Hillary Kanter can write and probably had a good editor; however, the fact checking in this book is abysmal. Sadly, some readers won't care, reading it for the man-bashing (and some needed to be bashed) and mild, but fairly well-written love scenes. However, the historical inaccuracies are unforgivable. And what was worse, there didn't seem to be any compelling reason to avoid historical accuracy. Sorry, but we weren't at war when Ariel met Lindbergh in spring, 1939; Beethoven's 2nd premiered in 1803 not 1800; Hemingway was in Paris not Key West in May, 1926; Margaret Mitchell had been married for 14 years and not dumped by a boyfriend the night GWTW was premiered. The inaccuracies went on and on.

Sadly, many of her best lines are really from others in the form of clichés, quotes, and asides. There is a final surprise character late in the story, but again this is a rehashed technique and done better in the hands of more experienced writers. In all, this story has the feeling of being dashed off in a moment of inspiration without the soak time to make it a worthy buy. I should give this book a "2" for all the grief it gave this reader, but the story arc does provide a modicum of growth for Ariel and a message for her to hold on to in the end, though it is weak and somewhat mixed. This is a low-end "3".

37 of 46 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars No Walter Mitty of romance August 5, 2012

By Lady ReadsaLot

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

The 5 star reviews for this book are very misleading and I broke one of my own rules by not checking to see that most are from one or two review people.

There is a reason Ariel is unlucky in finding love...she is self absorbed and more than a little immature. And crazy.

I found the main character totally unlikeable and had a hard time understanding how she fell in love with all of the historical men she "met" despite seeing their flaws up front and personal--false teeth, anti-Semitic, bisexual, married, insane---they all came across a lot worse than than the men she had dated in real life. And these men fell totally, irrationally in love with her gorgeous looks and captivating personality pretty much upon first sight.

The historical inaccuracies were more than annoying. Margaret Mitchell was married for 20 years, including the time period given here. There is no proof to substantiate what is a complete slander of Charles Lindbergh's character. And Hemingway? I understand artistic license for the sake of the story, but some of this was too much.

I did not enjoy this book and almost gave up several times. I was hoping for some sort of redemption in the ending but was disappointed. From her seemingly endless supply of money---s free lance writer in NYC with money to travel around the country on vacation at the drop of a hat, really?--to her "love" of Mr. Perfect who as a therapist should have sent her packing, the main character was just not someone I enjoyed reading about.

24 of 30 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars It stunk through many eras! August 7, 2012

By Ionia Martin TOP 500 REVIEWER

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

Really?

Ok I get the time travel/romance thing right? But this was just bad. I liked the first couple of paragraphs as they made me smile and I thought, oh good, an author with a sense of humor. Then I read on. As the chapters progressed I found I couldn't stop shaking my head. The heroine bounces from past to present from one era to another falling into the arms...and beds of various celebrities. The heroine spends more time being confused than accomplishing anything, distancing the reader from her ever farther as the book winds on. I get that fiction isn't supposed to be real, but this was far fetched even for fiction. The author definitely used liberal amounts of imagination when crafting the supposed lives of these infamous people. It was on the verge of insulting.

More About the Author

Hillary Kanter's first career was as a multi- award winning hit songwriter/singer with more than 100 recordings
of her songs by artists such as Tim Mcgraw, Kenny Rodgers, Martina McBride, Dolly Parton, Alabama, and
others. As a recording artist for RCA and MCA records, she recorded two critically acclaimed albums, and was a finalist
for The Academy Of Country Music Best New Female Artist.

Needing a new challenge for her creativity, in 2002 she wrote the book Dating Sucks:A Single Woman's Confessions, Obsessions, and Lessons, appearing on over 80 National Talk Radio shows, and often a regular as a "Bad Date Expert". This is her first book of fiction, Dead Men Are Easy To Love--an off-shoot of sorts to her memoir Dating Sucks.

She loves writing about male-female relationships, from a humorous standpoint. Being as she thinks they are practically "DOOMED from the get-go," she found out "you'd BETTER have a sense of humor if you're living in the dating universe. You're in for a long, scary ride.
Aside from all that dating gloom and doom, she is also a major pet advocate.
" I've always loved cats so much that my mother feared that in my old age, I'd turn into a "cat lady," she says ."That always upset me a little. But she needn't have worried about it happening when I was OLD--because I'm becoming one already," she recently quipped in an interview.
Hillary lives in Nashville Tennessee with a very tolerant man, and their five male cats, referring to their home as "testosterone central."

P.S. She keeps a VERY clean house.