2 out of 4 stars
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Hello, My Love by Evy Journey
The genre of this book is modern romantic fiction and is set in what I understood to be a fictional region in America. The story centres around a young couple, Elise and Greg, who become friends because of Greg’s business connection with Elise’s father and ultimately fall in love. Elise is a young Law student, soon to graduate, while Greg runs the business his father left him after he died and is a high profile eligible bachelor engaged to be married to a beautiful socialite called Lori. The relationship between Greg and Elise begins and stalls quite early in the story; as Greg’s bachelor past catches up with him after he calls off his engagement to Lori, neither Greg or Elise feel able to commit to one another. The relationship between Elise and her parents develops during this time and new levels of understanding grow between them. As the story unfolds, Greg and Elise are reunited and as anticipation of their wedding heightens Elise is involved in a nasty accident which renders her incapacitated and in hospital for a number of weeks. Meanwhile, Greg and her family seek to discover the truth about who was responsible for the accident.
The character development in this story was slow and fairly weak. I grew a sense of who the characters were over time but struggled to genuinely warm to either of them or understand the depth of feeling they had for one another and why. I felt the same with the relationship between Elise and her parents although I enjoyed how the author created opportunity during the story for the relationship between Elise and her mother to be deepened and I thought that it was thoughtfully portrayed.
I found the storyline to be fairly formulaic although not unreadable. I did find myself wondering what would happen next as I turned the pages although never with any degree of deep intrigue or suspense. I found some of the dialogue between the characters to be unbelievable in the context of what was happening in the story and was disappointed that certain themes had been skimmed over rather than dealt with in more detail. I also found there to be an excessive use of commas throughout the entire book. I suspect the author was attempting dramatic pause for effect however this was lost on me and I felt almost half of the commas used were not required. I was pleased to find there was no use of gratuitous sex scenes which are often included to spice up a romance novel that doesn’t contain an overly absorbing storyline.
I would suggest this as a nice enough book to read if you don’t have much time and wish for something superficially absorbing without requiring too much brain power. I think the author warmed up during the story and the narrative flowed slightly better during the middle and towards the end than it had at the beginning, however, I can only really describe it as fair rather than good and therefore rate it 2 out of 4 stars.
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Hello, My Love
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