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A NEW BEGINNING Courtni Wright BET/Arabesque October 2000 (1) Melanie Schuster |
Contemporary Holiday Romance |
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PLOT SYNOPSIS: |
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REVIEW: |
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Virginia Summers is a manager in a firm that does business internationally. On New Year’s Eve, at a gala given by the company, she meets John Robinson, a new vice-president. They bicker, apologize and dance. They leave the company’s dinner dance, somehow get seated at a 4 star restaurant in Washington DC with no reservations. The next day they go to church, share hotdogs at the National Zoo and by Monday she has decided to leave the country to follow him to his new assignment in Europe. She gets her transfer in the twinkle of an eye, she hops on over to England without telling him she is coming, although to his credit he somehow sensed when she arrived. They spend a brief blissful time together until he informs her that he is being transferred to France, and they spend some dizzying weeks with rhapsodic weekends in various European sites where they fall even deeper in love. All is well until they return to the States to announce their engagement. This happy event is clouded a bit by the arrival of his wife, whose existence had forgot to mention until that very point… If you can believe that you can be seated with no reservations in a popular restaurant in DC on New Year’s Eve without reservations, then you will have no problems believing everything else in this book. If that one strains your faith in romantic miracles, you are not alone. My main concern with this book has to do with the style in which the story was told. It seems as though what the author really wanted to do was write a heart wrenching World War II romance. The heroine wants to go to England to see the ‘white cliffs of Dover’ an image taken from one of her favorite songs…this was a song made hugely popular by Kate Smith, hardly a contemporary singer! Virginia also spends Sundays at the USO hall dancing with the soldiers and drinking punch… If it were not for the occasional mention of e-mail or some other contemporary thing, I would have thought that I really was reading some wartime romance. Actually, I think that a story set in that era would have a lot of appeal. It would not have played out exactly in the glowingly romantic terms used to describe their European wanderings since the story of the treatment of black soldiers in WWII is well documented. But it would be a fascinating story. A NEW BEGINNING, however, strains the credulity of the reader a few too many times with its odd denouement and strange plot twists. I was willing to hang in there until the wife showed up. Having worked for multi-national companies in the past, I was even willing to go along with the idea that Virginia could get transferred to Europe without waiting for years because the company ‘needed volunteers’ to go. But when wifey popped up, it was over for me. A very dear friend who also happens to be a successful writer of multicultural romances once told me that you can’t spring something on a character that the reader doesn’t know. In other words, the writer has to plant some seeds, shed some light, and let the reader in on the secret before it is sprung on the character. Now I know precisely what she meant. |
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jeanette@romanceincolor.net (11th November 2000) |
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