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16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The Title Tells All!, July 18, 2011
This review is from: Love Story (Paperback)
Love Story is my first Jennifer Echols' book and I was not disappointed. Love Story was creative, unique, and full of funny moments. I loved the premise of this novel, that Erin and Hunter used their creative writing class assignments to send heated messages back and forth to each other. Learning their backstory along the way only added to the richness of the tale.
I enjoyed Erin as a lead female. She was smart, and had her mind set on what she wanted to be. Although she had came from money, she was determined to work as hard as possible to get to her goal, even if that meant eating nothing but peanut butter crackers to do it. Hunter was a frustratingly fantastic lead male. One second you want Erin to smack him and the next you want her to kiss him senseless, which makes for a fun romance!
My only problem with this book, and the reason it was a 4 star instead of a 5 star for me, was that I desperately wanted another chapter at the end. I just felt like I didn't get enough closure with the storyline, or the romance, or the family dynamic that I was already so invested in. I think even one more chapter could have wrapped this up better for me, but it just wasn't there.
Overall, Love Story was exactly what it's title tells us it will be, but it is a fantastic one! This is a light-hearted and funny love story for the romantic in all of us! I enjoyed being swept away with Erin and Hunter and if you like funny or romance I think you will too.
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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
I vote for a sequel to make up for this abrupt ending - anyone else?, July 23, 2011
This review is from: Love Story (Paperback)
I love a great romance with all its conflicts, embarrassing moments, and quirky friends which capture my emotions and leave me breathlessly waiting for the beautiful, passionate resolution. Well, I am still waiting! As great as the beginning of this story is, it just ends - abruptly.
****Some Spoilers throughout****
Erin has grown up rich by not emotionally unscarred. Her mother was beat-up by her father and after leaving him, found love then, was accidentally killed by a started race horse on her mother's horse ranch. Erin was raised by her emotionally distant grandmother who wants her to take over the family business by majoring in business in college. She refuses, and her grandmother gives her college money to Hunter along with the promise of the ranch as an inheritance.
Hunter is the son of the work hand her mother fell in love with when she was killed. They were friends before the accident, but Erin withdrew after her mother's death and now is furious with him for taking her inheritance. On the day her first writing assignment is to be critiqued by the class, Hunter is admitted into the group and hears her first story - it's about him.
He definitely has feelings for her, but she refuses to see them as anything but hate and her own feelings of resentment prevent her from really looking closer. But they are in the same dorm and they have two class together and end up spending some time together as they write their assignments about each other for class.
Erin starts to believe that his feelings for her are real when she overhears a conversation between him and her grandmother. Now she knows the truth - or she thinks she does.
This was definitely an entertaining story with great secondary characters that made the plot more fun. Summer was a great friend to play off of and her relationship with Hunter's roommate was a fun secondary romance. Staging it at college was also more interesting and helps set the maturity level a little higher than high school. It is a good place to see relationships away from parental authority but still subjected to it.
But, still the ending - so unsatisfying. All this angst and feuding to be just summed up in the last two pages. I would have preferred more dialogue and more romance to this resolution. It just felt sudden and tentative. These two are never congenial for long, so a more convincing declaration of forgiveness and love would have been more satisfying.
I am definitely a Jennifer Echols fan and loved "Going Too Far "and "Forget You". I actually think I like "Love Story" the best, although, "Going Too Far" was really great. I would definitely be willing to read a sequel to Love Story and consider this ending a cliff hanger (cough, Ms. Echols, cough).
Would I/Did I buy it? Yes
Would I read it again? Yes
Would I recommend it to friends? Yes
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Not one of Ms Echols' better efforts, November 21, 2011
This review is from: Love Story (Paperback)
I was really quite angry at the end of the book. I had expected so much better from this author. I don't know when she wrote this book but I can only hope it was years ago, before she developed her skill, because that's the only excuse she can use.
The plot was just all over the place. I was never sure of what the characters truly felt, despite the heavy doses of introspection by the female protagonist. The minor characters were treated like so much excess baggage, shedding them abruptly after giving us a whole bunch of irrelevant information.
The apparent main plot - a grandmother disowning her own grandchild and handing over the reins of the property to the stable master's son to teach her a lesson on obedience - is trampled under the granddaughter's messed up relationship with the 'stable boy', both of who believe the other hates them.
It's a goddamn mess and Ms Echols did hardly anything to untangle it well. In the end their issues were only partly resolved and happy ending was an uncertain hope.
Maybe all the angst in the book and general feelings of betrayal would have flowed better from a more mature Jennifer Echols' hand, but I doubt it. The plot just plain sucked.
The only parts I truly enjoyed were the two short stories that Hunter wrote for their creative writing class - One was a gritty yet touching piece on his longing for Erin (the spoilt, angst-y granddaughter) and his determination to ignore it; the second was a rather poignant one about a child and his curiosity that drives him to experiment on long stretches of fields, trying to estimate exactly how big the universe is.
Those stories showed Echols' potential.
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