Customer Reviews

Desperate Measures: A Novel

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

What a wonderful story. It warmed my heart. The story was about two best friends Pete and Annie. A coming of age story where they both search for their destiny and find out that they share what is most important. A heartwarming once in a life time friendship. Good book to chase away the blues.

I found the novel intriguing and stayed up late many nights continuing to read. The ending was perfect and the characters were actual people rather than fictionally unrelatable.

Pete and Annie had always been best friends. Annie was and is in love with Pete. He's in love with her too but neither one tells the other. Annie is sure but Pete is confused.

Pete becomes engaged to Maddie. They have plans for a life together. Maddie and her best friend Janny witness a murder and are put into the Witness Protection Program. Pete has no idea what happened to them. They just dropped off the face of the Earth. Maddie had a deal with the authorities that they would let her have a meeting with Pete to let him know what was going on but everything went wrong.

While they are separated, Pete asks Annie to take over Maddie's new business, which he financed, called Fairy Tales.

Maddie finds a way to call Pete and give him hope that they may be together after all.

Does absence make the heart grow fonder or does absence give two people time to think things through and realize their true feelings?

I won't give away the ending. It was a good book. One to enjoy reading on a hot summer day.

It is so much easier to fall in love with a stranger than your good friend who'd put everything on the back burner to come to the aid of a friend. I thought that growing up without a mother was hard until I read about Pete losing both parents as a young child, as did Addie and Janny who also grew up in the foster care program. Now, that has to be the pits.

Pete had dreams of finding his cousin and using the thing his mother left to him as a remembrance, simultaneously at the age of sixteen. Neither worked the way he had imagined. With the monetary help of an uncle who lived a sullen, unforgiving life because he could not marry the woman he loved, Pete attended Harvard where he met his destiny, Annie, and yet it took a total disaster in Pete's personal life for him to learn these facts.

It was twenty years after he gave up on finding Barney, that he found what he thought was his true love. She was so wild, lovely and different from him. He was old beyond his years. As the lovebirds were planning a future together, he secured the funds for Mattie to find her dream life in a store she named appropriately "Fairy Tales." He'd thought that this gypsy girl was his destiny and soon put Annie on the back burner of his life. He was living a fairy tale, as Mattie and her childhood friend Janny were. Janny always had the goal of finding her birth mother, as the adoption did not take and she grew up in foster homes along with Mattie.

It's a good thing these young women were tough on the inside as they witnessed a terrible murder and were taken into the Protective system which was a Hell on Earth. Annie left her career in law on hold and rushed to her friend's assistance to carry on with "Fairy Tales" and to decorate his new fancy house out by the lake along the Eastern coast near his uncle's mansion. During this separation, both Pete and Mattie changed drastically; they learned to never take things for granted again and never presume, never assume.

Annie learned the hard way that she had actually loved Pete all these years more than as a friend. She learned that love meant putting the other person first and was wanting the other's happiness more than you want your own. Pete had no time for trips down Memory Lane, and he persisted in dreaming of Mattie. One day he realized what he had been missing and looked at Annie through the eyes of love. How could something so ordinary be so wonderful? He had depended on her for his emotional needs since their Harvard days; when she went her own way to find some solace for her broken heart, he goes after her.

She finds Barney for him, his good fortune, as Pete gives him the uncle's house and all of its contents. He has a new home and a woman to complete the picture of domestic tranquility. From that moment, he meant to live in the present and put the past completely behind him. Who has time to wallow in self-pity?

This book "Desperate Measures" is a very good book. In the book Pete Sorenson talks about how he lost his mom and dad, and he remembers memories from when he was little. Me reading that and comprehending that makes me think how lucky I am to still have my mom and dad. I think it's great that Pete has such a great friend like Anne Gabriel. They're friendship makes me charish mine even more! I think it shows true friendship when Anne drops everything to go help Pete. I think in a way Pete needed Maddie to show him who he really truley loved. By almost marrying Maddie it made him see that he really loved Anne, not Maddie. Pete had to go through many difficult times in this book. He not only lost Maddie but he lost his uncle Leo too. Pete went to desperate measures to try to get Anne to feel the same way as he did for her, which in the end worked out for the best.
Reading this book makes me appreciate life and be thankful for what I all have. I will admit I tend to take life for granted and I think, whatever happens, happens. I now do not think that way anymore. You have to live while you're alive, is what I now think. Like Pete's feelings for Anne and how he couldn't tell her, I have the same problem. There are so many people I care for and love so much, but they don't know that and I wish so much that they did know. I just don't have the courage to tell them my honest feelings. With the help of this book I have been able to tell a lot of the people I care for, just how much I care for them. I owe it all to "Desperate Measures." Thank you!

I love Fern Michaels books, each one is better then the other, you can't go wrong with her books.

Aloha, Fern Michaels!!! "Desperate Measures" is absolutely, positively, indeed, My Favvvvvvvvv Fiction Book in the Whole Wide World. I truly enjoyed reading it -- immensely!!! It was so heart felt and touching, especially concerning the two young boys, who made promises to each others. Although time, age, distance and dire circumstances kept them apart for decades, they reunited later in life. I often reread that part when things are going sour in my life as to glean a lil more hope and strength.

The ending was simply, superb. I've read many of your books and look forward to reading more. You're indeed my favvvvvvvvvv author in the whole wide world of fiction, hehe. Keep up the {{{GOOD WORK, FERN!!!}}} I shall read perhaps alllllll of your books, this life time, lol.

Mahalo for sharing your ingenius wrting talents w/ the UNIVERSE.

God Bless,

JASMINE STARR in Hawaii

Not one of Fern Michaels best but it is well written. I enjoyed it enough to stay up nights "reading" the morning in. I read to fall asleep... not with this one

Desperate Measures: A Novel What's not to like, it is by Fern Michaels. She is one of the best.

This book, Desperate Measures has got to be one of Fern's best, a real page turner, great story. A must read.