Customer Reviews

Maybe Baby

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

 

 

With one year to go in her residency, Dr. Delaney Poole visits Harp Cove, Maine for the first time because she wants to practice medicine there. The town with its winter population of five thousand seems perfect to Delaney. So she prays that the National Health Service agrees to allow her to pay off her medical debt to them by assigning her there for three years following completion of her residency. Perhaps it is her elation over the town, but Delaney shares an intimacy with Sailboat Jack.

One year later, Delaney and her infant Emily return so that the former can set up her medical practice. However, she is stunned when Jack Shepard of Sailboat Jack fame enters her office due to an accident he just suffered. She is shocked to learn he is not from Cape Cod, but a local who happens to be her landlord as well as her babys father. Unable to cope, Delaney begins a series of fabrications that soon prove the adage oh what a web we weave when we first deceive especially when love further obfuscates the situation.

Any novel that can include a reference to the Silver Surfer has to be admired even if MAYBE BABY requires reader acceptance on why Delaney escalates her house of lies. Once taking that leap, readers will find the humorous story line quite genial even with its serious undertone that rural America needs doctors. The lead couple is an alluring duo in spite of the mendacious Delaneys growing fears of discovery. Elaine Fox furnishes the audience a lively contemporary romance.

Harriet Klausner

This book had a fun sweet beginning. Delaney and Jack had great chemistry. I thought this was going to be a great fun screwball romance, but it fell flat. Delaney turned out to be a sniveling, self absorbed, liar. The author never adequately conveyed a strong enough reason to continue to lie to the entire town. The ending was anticlimatic and I wished Jack hooked up with Kim took custody of Emily and left.

Firstly, the cover has nothing really to do with the book (not the author's fault), but if you're looking for a hunky labourer type, this is not the book for you.

Next: someone else mentioned making the leap of disbelief, but that was just too much for me. The characters, especially the hero, did things I didn't understand and junped to too many conclusions. I didn't understand why the hero was so desperate to prove the heroine was lying about being married, yet *didn't* ask himself why she was doing it. Probably because he would have come up with the answer pretty quickly. The heroine was too passive for me to really care about what happened to her.

Unfortunately for me as a reader, I didn't find a "vibrant new voice" with this book.

Delaney on a job interview in a small town in Maine, indulges in a one night stand (something she has never done) with the 'Magic Man' and despite precautious she ends up expecting. Suddenly, she regrets they did not bother to observed prelimaries - like exchanging names and telephone numbers.

Even though she is facing being life as new doctor, she quickly adapts and enjoys her role as new mother. 6 months after the baby is born she moves back to the small down in Maine, still expecting to never see the baby's father since she believed he was passing through. Instead, as she quickly discovers since he is her first patient, that he has always lived in the town. Since the 34 year old father of her child is standing there with his 19 year bimbo cheerleader girlfriend, she panics and says she is married. Worse, she discovers he is the landlord of her new residence!

The lie grows and grows until she finds herself buying clothes and creating magazine subscripts in the 'husbands' name, trying to convince Jack that she is married.

It is often a little stretched, and you really wonder if someone would go to these extremes, but Fox's writing makes the whole thing enjoyable!

DC Medical resident Delaney is excited to be in a tourist town in Maine researching the clinic where she hopes to work next year. After a night of passion with another tourist, she discovers that she's pregnant and since the town is small (and rife with gossips), she is worried that people will think badly of her love child. When Jack, her baby daddy appears in her clinic in need of medical attention, she discovers that he is actually not a tourist - but rather a hometown hero and constant fodder for gossip. So she blurts out that she's married. That little white lie causes huge ramifications when she has to keep telling more lies to sustain her web of deceit. Jack still carries a torch for Delaney, and decides that he wants to be indispensible to Dee and her baby when her "marriage" falls apart. Will Jack turn his libido off long enough to realize that Emily is his child?

As in most of her early novels, Fox creates a sexy and engaging hero, then snips his nards off so that he's a puppet to a conniving female. Like another reviewer, I was hoping he'd sail off into the sunset with anyone else.

I found this story to be really cute and funny. You have to overlook a few things that (hopefully) a person wouldn't really do in real life...but then this IS fiction.

I especially liked the part where she "found" the picture of her "husband" and then the picture starting popping up everywhere.

If you'd like a funny story that you shouldn't take too seriously and just enjoy - then I would recommend this book. This is the first book by Ms. Fox that I've read and I'm anxious to read some more of her work.

This book was entertaining but not very good. Delaney, the leading female character, reacted in such illogical ways and the leading man, Jack, never got mad when he should have. It made it so that I couldn't respect her and he came out looking like a pushover.

I liked the characters, and I liked the fact that Ms. Fox gave voice to both Delaney and Jack, but Delaney's antics to try to hide the fact that Jack was her daughter's father were just a little too ridiculous and heavy-handed. I would have thought that since she had decided early on not to have contact with the child's father, she would have come up with a good cover story to explain her single parenthood. I also would have expected her to keep her facts straight without resorting to writing them down in a list and putting it where it could be found. After all, she knew she was returning to the town where the child was conceived, and someone may have noticed her and Jack together.

The characters were all interesting and amusing, the romance sexy, and the dialogue humorous, but the contrived and somewhat annoying nature of the plot conflict is what makes this book rate only 3 stars, which is a shame because there was a lot of potential here.

I couldn't disagree more with the Publisher's Weekly review stating that this book won't gain Ms. Fox a broader readership. This is the first Elaine Fox novel I've read, but it certainly won't be the last. Many romance novels that try to blend in comedy often fall flat, but I laughed out loud while reading this book, particularly in the last 75 pages, where all the story lines converge. I appreciated that the "hero" of this novel was a regular guy with a bit of a problem with responsibility--I don't know who created the convention that romanctic heroes have to be millionaires, cops, or soldiers, but this novel defies it brilliantly. I also thought that the romance was not overshadowed by the farce--the beach scene at the beginning of the book is among the most romantic I've ever read. The sparks generated by that scene are enough to carry readers through the shenanigans that follow. I'm looking forward avidly to Ms. Fox's next contemporary romance.

Delaney Poole finds herself pregnant after a one-night stand with gorgeous Jack Shepherd. It happens when she is investigating one possible location for her residency with a man she thinks is on vacation there. She comes back to Harp Cove, Maine, over a year later with baby Emily only to find that Jack is her landlord! She panics, and blurts out to Jack that
she's married, and waiting for her husband to join her. She scrambles to keep her story straight from then on. Delaney is functioning on fear. She doesn't want anything in her daughter's life that could hurt her, and she has heard so much that indicates Jack would be a bad father and a reluctant one.
Jack is stunned that Delaney is Harp Cove's new doctor and is happy to see her again. But he doesn't really believe that she's married. She talks about her husband too much and also has a tendency to forget his name.... He senses Delaney's fear, and wants to soothe her in his arms. But how would he feel if he knew that she fears his involvement in their daughter's life?
Fear leads Delaney to a foolish act that she is forced to
compound with sometimes hilarious results. Jack doesn't deserve the treatment he receives, and he is a great hero. This book will make you laugh, sigh and squirm on your way to a satisfying ending.