Customer Reviews

One Summer (Celebrity Magazine Series)

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

 

 

This book is the vastly superior sequel to "Second Nature" and the characters of Lee and Hunter make a brief appearance here. The heroine of "One Summer" is Bryan Mitchell, who was first introduced in "Second Nature" as Lee's best friend. Bryan is a photographer who specializes in portraits of people and memorable faces. She is asked to collaborate on a book called "One Summer in America", and to spend the summer driving from L.A. to N.Y., documenting Americans at work and play. The other photographer contributing to the book is studly Shade Colby, who specializes in gritty, realistic photos. They spend the summer traveling across America, taking pictures and falling in love. I enjoyed their road trip very much.
Excerpt from the back of the book:
"The assignment: a fabulous coast-to-coast photo tour of the USA. The problem: straight-shooting photojournalist Shade Colby didn't believe in unity-he always worked alone. The catch: if he wanted this job, he'd have to spend the summer with Bryan Mitchell, a sexy society photographer who was as great a temptation as the assignment itself!"

One Summer: There was nothing unique about the dynamics between the couple or the romance itself, but what made this book so interesting was the setting and storyline. Bryan, a portrait photographer for a glossy magazine, was famous for espressing what lies beneath the surface of her subject's face, eyes, smiles. Shade was a Pulizer-prize winning photojournalist who was famous for presenting the overall drama of a scene. They bring their two different styles together, traveling across the USA, creating a powerful photoessay of summer life in America. I loved the artistic representations vividly described from each of their opposing prospectives of The Last Day Of School, Little League Games, Grandmother and Granddaughter on the Beach, Roadside Reststops, Small Town Carnivals, Kansas Wheatfields, East Coast Clambakes, etc. Awesome!

One Summer is loosely connected to Second Nature (Silhouette Special Edition #288). That is, the heroines of both are friends, and both worked for Celebrity magazine.

Bryan Mitchell and Shade Colby.... okay, let me just get this out of the way here--these names drive me insane. Not only do we have complete ambiguity as to which is which (maybe it's a gay romance?), but the last names could be first names as well. This was, apparently, the thing to do in the mid-80s when this was written, but... ARGH! Luckily, I've read this before, and Bryan shows up in a few other books, so I didn't have any trouble this time. The first time I read it, I missed half the story trying to figure out who was who.

Obviously, I got over it, as you see by the 5 stars. Yep. 5. I Lurrrrvvvve this book.

Bryan Mitchell is a celebrity photographer. Shade Colby is a serious journalistic photographer. Somebody (I'm not clear who) decided it would make a nice book to have both their perspectives on one American summer. Their different approaches to photography naturally follow from their personalities--Bryan is the cheerful optimist, Shade is uncomfortable with emotions.

The book follows them as they travel cross-country in a van, taking photographs, getting on each other's nerves, slowly getting to know each other, building respect, becoming a team, and eventually falling in love.

It's a quintessential romance, really. Nothing extraneous to get in the way, just two people falling in love. And what's guaranteed to grab me: they develop respect and friendship first.

The absolutely beautiful thing about One Summer is the photography scenes. Shade and Bryan make a lot of stops, (there's a map in the front of the book) and at each stop, each scene, there are slight differences in how they approach the subjects they're photographing and each other. You're not whacked over the head with it--it's just there, subtly showing how they're changing during the trip. Just lovely. When I finished reading, I wanted to start reading it all over again just to see how it was done.

All right, I do have another quibble--it didn't interfere with my enjoyment of the book, but Bryan and Shade completely ignored the entire northern half of the country, except for NYC. As a Michigan native, I was a little insulted.

By the way, yes, there is headhopping in this book. It's a Nora Roberts book. But it also didn't interfere with my enjoyment of the story, and I think I figured out why headhopping--at least Nora's headhopping--doesn't bother me. I think it's because I'm not reading the hero's story or the heroine's story, but the couple's story, so getting both their POVs in the same scene doesn't throw me out because I'm thinking of them together.

I am a great fan of Nora Roberts, her romance and mystery romance novels. She is one of my favorite authors. Don't waste your money buying this book. Bryan Mitchell and Shade Wilder are both professional photographers. They know of each other, but have never met. Life-Style magazine hires them to drive across the United States, taking photographs of America as they go. Except for a couple of interesting side incidents, along the way, and many pictures taken, they spend most of the time arguing or not talking and watching the scenery go by. They gradually fall in lust, and then in love. Then, they have to decide if the want to be tied to one person on a long term basis.

Once again, an author trades upon their reputation for good, solid writing and releases one of their early disasters.

For Nora Roberts fans, this is a tremendous let down.

I have read better from a Freshman composition class.

One of Roberts' earlier Category Romances, newly available on Kindle. (About d*mn time, too. Harlequin (for instance) has been working on their authors' backlists for a couple of years now.)

Two photographers with very different styles take an assignment to catalogue "Summer in America." Journey books are notoriously difficult to navigate well, but Roberts does her usual bang up job.

I liked the heroine, but the hero . . . well, the grim and brooding type is not a favorite of mine. She does a great job of lightening him up. But all their conflicts are emotional and self-inflicted, and my patience for that is limited.

The real star of this show is the visual imagery invoked. I mean, I am reading a short, black & white text-only paperback, and I walked away thinking I just browsed a glossy full color coffee table book. It was so fun! And it left me hungry to see Fall, Winter and Spring.