Customer Reviews

Full House (Janet Evanovich's Full Series, No 1)

5 star:		(24)
4 star:		(20)
3 star:		(19)
2 star:		(29)
1 star:		(62)

 

 

Janet Evanovich is very honest about this book: 'I wrote and published the original in 1989....Charlotte Hughes and I now have made it bigger and better.'

Charlotte Hughes may have made it bigger, but she did not make it better. Friends who have read the original smaller version liked it; no one I've talked to has liked this version.

The characters are typical Evanovich and delightful; the plot seems to be going along nicely, and then the padding begins. Plot is going in all directions and the charm of the Evanovich books is no where in sight.

I bought this book after reading the first four or so chapters; they were a delight. Then the book got boring; I started skipping paragraphs, then pages, then raced on to the improbable ending.

My advice: save your money for the new Plum. Don't go here.

"Full House," took me about three hours to read, cover to cover, and thankfully I was only in public for about forty minutes of that, on a bus. I laughed out loud at least once a chapter at Evanovich's typical slapstick style of storytelling - enough to earn strange looks from the other passengers on the bus.

This is no Stephanie Plum mystery - and I didn't go into it expecting one, which I think many others might have and would explain the overall low rating this book received. I enjoyed it as what it was: crazy fun romantic hijinks with impossibly neurotic characters aplenty. When you put in a blonde bombshell airhaid into the home of a strict but fair schoolteacher, add in a young genius who blows things up, a wrestler and his wrestling buddies, a polo-teaching rich man and his crazy ex-fiance, and, of course, an ineffective bug killer, you can't help but set the stage for typical Evanovich fallout. When the schoolteacher falls for the playboy, despite the airhead's attempts to set her up with "Big John" the anatomically exaggerated wrestler, things are sure to fire up as zany as ever.

My one real frustration with the book was how terribly it was edited. Nick, the love interest of our heroine, is referred to as Neil a few times (why would you have to change the name of the character when this book was re-written?), and there are a large enough number of other small mistakes that derailed my train of thought just often enough to make me drop this review from four stars to three.

This book was candy, not a three-course meal, and as a candy-book, it was wonderful. You read it quickly, enjoy it, and then move on to another book. Go in expecting a light and quick read, and you'll be happy.

'Nathan

This book was worth the read. It was not Stephanie Plum, but if it were that would of added to her series. I don't understand all the bad ratings either. I thought it was a very cute story.
Not the adventure but I didn't find this story as predictable as the rest of the reviewers. I found the humor and character style like with the Plum series.

This was the first in the series and rewritten. I can only lay odds that the next one will be even that much better. This book was worth the read and I am sorry for all the bad reviews, I truly do not understand them.

This book took a lot of patience to complete, and I still can't believe I read the whole thing.

Stuck in midstream without a paddle, it floats between romance, mystery, mayhem and madness. Evanovich's usually quirky characters fly off the believability radar like stealth bombers, unfortunately undetected by my bad book warning system.

What starts out as a rich man, divorced woman love story in a horsey setting, becomes a comedy circus of professional wrestlers, crazy people, insects and endless (and I mean ENDLESS) repetition.

Evanovich and Hughes seem to have forgotten the KISS principle for effective writing, and I would recommend you forget this one.

Amanda Richards, February 26, 2005

(KISS = Keep It Simple, Stupid)

Since I'm a huge fan of Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum series, I eagerly picked up this book, expecting the snappy, witty voice I've come to expect. Unfortunately, that wasn't the case. In fact, the style is so different, if I hadn't seen Evanovich on the cover I would never have identified it as one of hers. Although I understand this is a revised version of an earlier book, FULL HOUSE wasn't THAT much earlier (four or five years at the most) than the first Plum book, so I wouldn't have expected such vast differences between the two. While there are flashes of cleverness in some of the dialogue, the prose is often sluggish and predictable, the chemistry between the protagonists is flat, and the frequent, and unclear, point of view changes are exhausting. Compared with the Plum books, this one seems extremely amateurish in comparison.

I'm not sure I understand how the collaboration between Evanovich and Charlotte Hughes was supposed to "improve" this early work. For someone with such a wonderful, and well deserved, reputation to team up with another writer -- when this is the result -- makes little sense to me. I will anxiously await the next Evanovich book, whether a new Stephanie Plum or not, but will be steering clear of any future books written by this team.

I am a BIG fan of the Stephanie Plum novels. They are such fun to read, so I decided to try other books by Ms. Evanovich, starting with Full House.

The first half of the book was rather vanilla, but not intolerably so. There was little plot, the characters were uninteresting, and the viewpoint was a hodge-podge of omniscient and third person subjective which was so confusing at times, I had a hard time separating truth/fact from character opinion. For someone as well-published as Evanovich, this book was very poorly written. It reads like someone's first novel. When I learned it was one of her earlier works, I thought I could cut her some slack, but to find out this is a re-written version of it -- BLECH. She should have known enough about how to tell a story by now. This book should have been allowed to go quietly out of print.

I lost interest half-way through the book, and while I am struggling to force myself through it, I don't think I'm going to make it. The dialog is boring, the characters cardboardy, and the plot has simply died. There's nowhere for them to go. The conflict has just petered out, so it's more like looking in the window of an ordinary person, watching their ordinary daily lives. Yawn. Don't waste your money. Get a Stephanie Plum novel if you want a fun read.

This was one of the most awful books I've ever read, and I can't believe it came from the same author who brings us the Stephanie Plum series.

Even after finishing the book, I have absolutely no idea why a charming playboy millionaire fell in love with a divorced schoolteacher with two small children. One day Billie shows up to take polo lessons, then suddenly Nick's got his cousin moving in with her, he's in love with her, and they're talking marriage. There was no development of the relationship at all. And since the two characters hopped into bed together so early in the book, there was no buildup -- the rest of the book seemed like filler until the "big climax," which was about as predictable as I've ever come across, since it was obvious who the bad guy was the minute I first saw their name appear in the book.

The book was also poorly edited -- Nick was referred to as Neil during one paragraph, Billie's son Joel went for two or three pages being called Joey, and the lady who sold Billie her wedding dress was introduced as Emma, then became Ida in the next paragraph.

Romance is obviously not this writer's forte, nor is proofing and editing. She really should spend her time fine-tuning her Stephanie Plum series, which is starting to become repetitious and stagnant, rather than cashing in on her name putting out garbage like this to pad her bank account.

I felt cheated after buying this book and starting to read it. It was horrible. And yes, I knew this was an early work, but I can't believe Janet Evanovich wasn't just putting this one out for the money. IT STANK. The characters were flatter than cartoons. It was ripe with cliche's. I agree, you definitely could see how far Janet has come with the Stephanie Plum books, but I thought her re-writing this would be better than it was. I could have written a better book than this. I had the urge to rewrite it every time I picked it up. I finally stopped picking it up and never finished it. I can't believe she did this to her fans.

After reading through all eight stephanie plum novels in the course of a week and a half this summer, I eagerly snatched up Full House at the book store, grateful for a "fix" before the next plum novel. I'm so sorry to say that it certainly did not meet my expectations. The relationship between the two main characters was boring and implausible. I didn't grow to like either one of them. I liked some of the secondary characters but they were not a big enough part of the book to carry it off. I am hoping that this book is not a hint of what is to come with future stephanie plum novels. I will be very sad.

Do not go into reading this novel expecting a characteristic Plum adventure! Take it for what it was intended to be...a lighthearted, wispy romance. Since it's from the beginnings of Evanovich's career as a writer, the story does not have the same depth and character development as seen in the Plum series. The attempts at wittiness are hindered, I believe, by the collaboration with fellow writer Charlotte Hughes. The secondary characters, in their outlandishness, are comparable to those in the Plum series. However, the main characters, Nick and Billie, don't hold their own among the minor characters. I can't say I was disappointed with this novel because I read it without expecting much from it. I think this was an attempt to tide over fans that eagerly await the next installment of the Stephanie Plum series. While this was a pleasant enough read, it just didn't accomplish that for me. I'll pass the time some other way as we all wait for the return of our favorite zany Jersey girl.