MartynVHalm

At the risk of damaging my noir novelist notoriety, I’m going to say I liked FTWW, but not unequivocally. For one thing, the title was too long. And there was too much romance in it. All these people pining for each other, instead of the fjords, like any Norwegian Blue would...

However, I can’t complain about the romance, because the author herself pleaded with me not to read and review her work. She didn’t want me to risk my alpha male reputation (where do women come up with that tripe?) and she thought I’d be bored out of my skull without at least one dead body.

So there’s this girl Fiona, who pines after the bad boy big brother of her best friend. The BBBB spurns her and marries a girl he knocked up, so he’s doing the honourable thing.

When I complained about this incongruity, the author claimed that I was focused too much on verisimilitude. Apparently I’m not much of a bad boy (hey, I always carried condoms so I wouldn’t be forced into a shotgun wedding). Despite the lack of verisimilitude, I read on.

The book starts at the preparations for a wedding between Mara, Fiona’s middle sister (the protagonist is the eldest of three McKenna sisters) and Fiona’s best friend Will, the younger brother of Bad Boy Noah Wilding (sure, put Wild in his last name, why not?).

Meanwhile, Noah is divorced from the bitch he married, because he found out that he was not the child’s biological father, so the passion between Noah and Fiona is rekindled, although they’re both older and wiser (ha-hum).

Mara is an insecure bitch (or is she just bitchy from having saint-like Fiona for an elder sister?) and Noah and Fiona conspire to break up the wedding to prevent Will from Unhappiness Ever After.

Now, I readily admit my unfamiliarity with the romance genre, so I told the author I would just read the book to comment on the technical aspects. Still, despite my many reservations, I was sucked into the story (or was it because of the torrid sex scenes?). Usually I wouldn’t be interested in the happiness of entitled and affluent beautiful people like Fiona or Noah, but they were so relatable I had to read on and know whether the promised HEA would indeed happen or if the wedding ended up in a massive bloodfest with Fiona snapping and going on a spree killing.

I’m sad to say there was no blood spilled or people maimed. While that was disappointing to me, Roberta Pearce’s readers will probably enjoy the ending of FTWW.

I just segued straight into reading Pearce’s second novel, A Bird Without Wings (another bloody long title).