1 out of 4 stars
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What Happened Last Year by Jaci Resor is a story of heartbreak and love. Eva lost her husband, Darren, last year. She had no idea what happened to him. He disappeared without a trace, and everyone believed that he had died. Eva decided that she would hire someone to help her run her farm, and a man named Daryl accepted the position. Unbeknownst to Eva, Daryl is her husband, but he can’t tell her. He had escaped from a group of kidnappers. They are in jail, but he is hiding, nonetheless.
The premise of this book sounded promising: a man hiding from a group of criminals who went home to try and comfort his grieving wife. However, the execution was extremely poor. The writing was a mess. I spotted more than ten errors in the first chapter alone. They weren’t small errors either; there were misspelled words, missing words, and all kinds of punctuation errors. Most of them would have been caught by a word processing system or online grammar checker.
In addition to the grammatical issues, the writing wasn’t interesting. There was almost no descriptive language. Instead, Resor stated what was happening.
The characters were also incredibly flat. Eva was a stereotypical damsel in distress. She spent the entire book pining away for Darren, even though an entire year had passed since he had disappeared. She also ended up sleeping with Daryl before she that knew he was Darren. She fell for the first man she had contact with, even though she claimed she still was madly in love with her husband. Darren also wasn’t an interesting character. He had escaped from a year of being tortured by a group of criminals. However, there was no mention of any damage to him other than a few scars. If Resor had gone into the psychological ramifications of the torture, Darren could have been an interesting character. Instead, Resor only mentioned a few physical scars and nothing else.
Overall, I rate this book 1 out of 4 stars. The summary made this book sound promising. However, there are a plethora of issues with it. For such a short book, there are a disconcerting number of errors. In its current state, I wouldn’t recommend this book to anyone; I especially would caution against younger readers because of the sexual content. If this book was carefully edited, it might be a fun, short read. However, it is not worth suffering through in its current state.
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What Happened Last Year
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