Customer Reviews

Up Close and Personal

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

The book started out okay and I thought we have a real plot here. There was some humor and I thought Jake might make a likeable hero. By the time Trinity enters the story it goes downhill from there. She is a childish annoying character and Jake becomes a wimp. Trinity is 30 and Jake in his 30's and they act like 10 year old children. When I got to the part Trinity accosts Jake in his home and knees him in the groin and hits him in the face, I decided I had enough.(A woman should not hit a man any more than a man should hit a woman-that was just stupid) Adults in their 30's resort to that kind of behavior? Jake is over 6 foot and works out and she can beat him up? Get real! From there on I didn't care about any of the characters. The story goes on and on and is so boring I finally skim to the last couple chapters to see how Ms Michaels ends the disaster. None of the characters have any depth to them and I'm annoyed with myself for wasting even a few hours on it. I'm usually not too critical of a fiction romance with light mystery because they are what they are and I don't usually expect the novel of the century but this one is so bad. I simply can not get past 2 adult people calling each other names and carrying one like 2 spoiled children. There is no real romance here nor much of a story. It's all quite unbelievable. Thankfully I picked this up at the library so didn't invest $$ in it.

This book is about a woman named Trinity Henderson who ran away at 15 yrs. after discovering she was being raised by a couple who worked for her parents. She eventually returns to her hometown after being discovered by her childhood crush. I found the book to be funny, at times a real page-turner and for most of it, I couldn't wait to see how it ended. The three-legged race was ecspecially entertaining. Four stars because I thought there were a few instances where the book started to lag.

Ms. Michaels has done it again with one of her best books ever.
Trinity was a child that was conceived not out of love but to help save Sarabrees precious Emily.

After 15 years of living a not very happy life she decides to leave and persue another life. Her new life is safe but then suddenly a reminder from the pasts finds her and she has to decide what to do.

She returs home after being away for 15 years and many things are told to her that she did not know before.

You wont be able to put this book down and I feel it is one of her best. A great read.

Similar to previous reviewers, I have to agree that Fern Michael's writing is very bland. It was hard to get too involved with the emotions of the characters, especially Jake and Trinity who were supposed to be the primary romantic interests in the story. The dialogue and movement of the story is dull and the outcome is unexcitedly predictable. Trinity Henderson, born out of necessity for her bone marrow to save her ill sister, Emily, a good start to a solid story, turns sour as we meet her selfish, cunning mother, Sarabess Windsor and milk toast of a father, Harold. The reader never quite feels the fitting sympathy the character deserves, given the mere fact that Ms. Michaels' writing lacks emotion. After the child is "used" for her bone marrow, she is given away to the hired help. Subsequent to running away from home and being taken in by a family only to be used as "child labor," Trinity returns to her home of Crestwood, SC to confront all those she left behind, including her long, lost teenage crush, Jacob Forrest. Jacob's aunt, Mitzi Granger, added an amusing touch to the story, a sort of throwback from our beloved Dolly Levi, Hello Dolly-type character. The author's initial premise for a story was a good one and could have been made a winner had she brought more life to the characters. This is my first experience with a work by Fern Michaels and I have to say it hasn't been a memorable one.

Other reviewers have assessed this work as "childish." I have to agree that the dialogue reads as if it were written by a thirteen-year-old, and the thirty-something characters are immature to the point of being ridiculous. There is no character development, but only formulaic plot gimmicks. There is nothing particularly likable about any of the people in this book; all of the parent characters are vicious or duplicitous, and the offspring characters are overgrown adolescents. Even BL, a teacher who abandons her class to a sub two weeks before the end of the school year, is of questionable integrity. And her mother's accident is a contrived emergency to get BL out of the way. (A woman who has been running a tractor mower for years suddenly falls off?)

Glaring technical errors: an attorney takes a cell phone call on a golf course; Jake's reminiscence of his mother's funeral includes the unspoken thoughts of his aunt; Jake wishes for a GPS system to help him follow Trinity, who is two or three cars ahead of him.

One might assume that some of the goings on are supposed to be funny, such as the attempts of two senior citizens to have a sexual encounter, but Michaels fails miserably as there is nothing funny about their inabilities or lack of compassion for one another.

Most of what happens in this story is so unlikely as to strain the boundaries of credulity. If there is a plot, it is disjointed and filled with unnecessary tangents. I borrowed the book, but, having read more than half, will not finish it. It's not interesting enough to engage my curiosity -- I simply don't care how it ends.

Fern Michaels is a captivating author--her expertise in keeping the reader interested certainly is multi-faceted!! I love all her books I have read thus far and will keep buying, reading and recommending her books to friends and family.

There is only one word to describe this book - CHILDISH. I don't mind a little fudging in a book but she went overboard. The dialog was ridiculous, Mitzi a pain and Jacob and Trinity irritating. The only characters in the book who were not aggravating was Sarabess and Rifkin. The fights between Jacob and Trinity were more like 12 yr olds fighting instead of two 30 somethings fighting. This book got on my nerve so bad, but I paid for it so I read it. What a waste of time. Though the idea for the book was good, it would have been a better book in a more mature author's hands.

This book was awful. The plot was all over the place, the characters childish and unbelievable. It jumped from person to person and never seemed to concetrate on any one character. The relationship between Trinity and Jake was so forced. They had a crush on each other as kids, hadn't seen each other for 15 years and yet their relationship never seemed to evolve past two kids hitting, taunting and namecalling each other. The part with the sack race was so annoying and seemed to come out of nowhere. It really had no place in the book and seemed to be an afterthought. I could go on and on about the disasters of this book but there aren't enough hours in the day. I definitely don't recommend wasting your time on this one!

This book was full of juvenile behavior and plot contrivances - the story focused initially on a woman who tries to save her only child who is dying of leukemia so she has another child only to abandon her at birth, supposedly because somehow doctors have been able to use the bone marrow from a baby less than a week old to replace the little girl's. Okay if you buy that miracle of modern medicine you'll be able get past some of the other implausible behavior of the other characters. The plot jumps all over the place, for example we're supposed to believe that the romantic lead in the story (a lawyer) is able to track down the missing daughter(his childhood best friend) in just days after learning she mailed a letter from Pennsylvania 15 years earlier. How,you might ask? Well by stopping at the local library and just asking the librarian is the answer. She immediately recalls all the people who moved into the area around the time of the missing daughter girl? The elderly couple who took in the missing girl initially seem to be nothing more than good Samaritans but later we learn that they were using the girl as their own pesonal slave so she again runs away in what turns out to be another poorly contrived plot element. I could have cared less about any of the characters and was disappointed because I'd heard that Fern Michaels was pretty good. This is one of the most awful books I've read in quite a long time.

!Spoiler Alert!
First of all their is not enough forgiveness in the world for the parents in this book. They're only 3 people in this book that were good parents and that is Mitzi, Jake's late Mother, and BL's Mom. Everybody else deserved to be kicked in the butt. Every body was mad at Sara Beth on how she treated her daughter but what about Harold he let it happen. A real father would have thrown Sara Beth out and did something about Emily and took in Trinity. There is no way a father would allow his daughter to be given away and raised by someone else. LOL he was so scared of Sara Beth that he had to sneak and see his kid. The money did not make up for this.

Another thing how in the world did Mitzie take such wussy back into her life after he practically left her at the alter. No freaking way! I would have told him off about his daughter and then I would have looked after her anyways, but I would have never taken him back. He made his bed now sleep in it.

Then Jake's father messed over his wife and she got him back in the end by leaving all her fortune to the son. That was the best part. Again how in the world could he put up with Sara Beth treating him like he's her slave or something. He even forgave her for almost messing up his job which he loves. Seriously, I would have through her to the curb.

Also I would not have sent the swedish couple anything; they were crazy, lazy and stingy. And the Henderson's were just plain scaredy cats. Mitzi could have found Trinity a long time ago if she gotten the envelope a long time ago.

And last but not least, Trinity herself got on my nerves. Get over it already! Why in the world would she run off after seeing Jake instead of just talking to him. She made BL think he was some kind of crazy person. This story would have been less if Jake would have just come right out and talk to Trinity instead of pretending to be some journalist. All in all this story was a mess.