Lucky at Love
Cynthia HamiltonContemporary romance
Available from Woodstock Press
ISBN: 978-0-9776278-1-3
August 2006
| Allison, a workaholic journalist, considers herself happily ensconced in a seven-year marriage to another workaholic. Neither one understands or is interested in the other's careers, but the marriage is steady and unadorned, and therefore predictable. At a friend's wedding, she and her husband Elliot are introduced to Jake Sorensen, currently an Oregon mule rancher, who's been married, and divorced, as many times as the years of Allison's marriage. Intrigued, she pitches him as a story possibility to her magazine editor, and soon heads off to the wilds of Eastern Oregon to find out the foundational truths behind his marital, and love life history; for in addition to seven incomplete marriages, Jake has enjoyed "dozens" of girlfriends and cohabitations.
Allison discovers Jake to be quite a bit more than she's expected: he has two girlfriends currently on his string, and as he begins to recount his memories of love found and released, she finds him a truly complex and puzzling individual. However, she struggles with grasping the thread she needs to pull the article together. She just can't get a handle on what makes Jake a serial lover, or on why countless women magnetize to him like an iron filing to the North Pole. I found this book much like a suspenseful mystery, but instead of the plot holding the twists and turns and convolutions, the characters did. Allison considers herself analytical, but as the story progresses she reveals, to herself and especially to the reader, facts and conclusions about her life that she hasn't yet acknowledged. The protagonist, Jake, is a complex mystery unto himself, and not until the end does the reader feel she's understood him; maybe not then! This is definitely a book worth reading as well as an author worth watching for.
Overall rating:
Reviewer: Annie |
