Thursday, January 25, 2007

Review: Last Chance for Marriage by Sandra Paul

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Title: Last Chance for Marriage
Author: Sandra Paul

Read copy: Mass Market Paperback
Published: August 1, 1992
Publisher: Silhouette
ISBN: 0373088833
ISBN-13: 9780373088836

Home economics teacher Amy Larkin refused to be daunted in her quest for a husband. Armed with her trusty new guidebook to marriage, Amy knew that finding the perfect mate would be as easy as pie. It was just a matter of the right ingredients—a dash of this, a pinch of that and voilà! Wedding cake!

Amy was crazy, Jake Weston decided. Certifiable. With her cookbook approach to marriage, his childhood nemesis shouldn't be unleashed on the unsuspecting bachelors of California. Especially since she'd informed him that passion was out, and practicality in—and particularly since she'd looked so sexy when she'd said it. But when she tried to recruit him to find likely prospects, Jake knew it was time to take matters into his own hands....

My rating:

Ugh. I have sort of a love/hate relationship with this little book. I'm a sucker for romance and happy endings...and old-school Harlequin/Silhouette titles, but this one...There are as much good things I could say about it as there are bad ones, so I'm stuck somewhere in the middle, undecided whether I like it or not.

It is a cute little number, but you do have to read it just for relaxation and send your brain to fetch the newspaper or something. Because if you, God forbid, involve your brain cells, all the cons of the story will overlap the good stuff and you'll want to hurl it into the wall...I know what I'm talking about.

It could've been a great story if not for the heroines harebrained plan of snatching herself a husband using a "self-help" book, a cooking book on how to get yourself a husband, apparently written by a highly intelligent woman. So intelligent she uses Dr. in front of her name. Yeah, I bet that book is quite a bestseller.
And why has the heroine decided to apply home-economics skills to get herself a husband? Because she's turning thirty and refuses to stay single after that. Wait, isn't this supposed to be going on in the nineties? Are we sure we didn't somehow ended up in a time-traveling machine?

Anyway, because she's so stubbornly following everything the doctor woman wrote in her little wonder-book, the heroine doesn't see what is right in front of her eyes...A hunk...On whom all the little devious plans described in the book have apparently worked.
And when she finally sees what is right in front of her eyes and the hunk finally decides he's had enough of all the lesser hunk parading through his house and takes the big step, the heroine gets even more stupid...Instead of being overjoyed, because her idiotic planned worked—on the guy she's secretly had a crush since childhood!—she refuses to believe it, because there's no way it could've worked...Hmmm, magical book, girl!

So she rejects him and hightails out of town. He, the hunk that he is, is pouting and moping, but does nothing to follow her, because that would diminish his hunkiness...And it's once again on the heroine to set things straight and the heroes hunkiness is salvaged and they live happily ever after.

Reading though what I wrote I can't believe I even gave it that rating, but it's much better when you read the whole story. Still, switch the brain off, or else...Consider yourself warned.

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