This was not the best of Rich’s books. The writing was disjointed. Quotations marks were missing in speech, and apostrophes were missing in conjunctions, so I had to guess what ‘shed’ or ‘Id’ meant. In some places, in seemed the entire sentences disappeared, or maybe scene breaks were lost somewhere in cyber space (I own a Kindle version of the novel), although it was easy to surmise what could’ve occurred during those missing chunks of time and text. Judging by the book info on Amazon, this novel might be (I'm guessing) the author’s first self-published effort and it was sloppy. The absence of a professional editor and a proofreader felt strongly.
Despite the faults of this book mentioned above, I read it till the end – because the story was… intriguing. The protagonist Portia got dumped by her boyfriend, proving once again that men don’t stick to the women in her family. When her mom called her home for the summer, she decided to go. After all, what worse could happen to her in the small town Truly, Georgia?
She arrived at home to find out: her mom and aunt and grandma found her a Flier – a temporary man for the summer, Ian. The trio of old women cheered, while Portia and Ian pretended to f&*#. Then Portia was caught between her new interest Ian and her former boyfriend, who came to win her back. Confused by her seething, contradictory emotions and by all the people who manipulate her so easily, Portia didn’t really understand what was going on – and neither did I.
The novel felt like the first draft: lots of good ideas, great story potential, and a very bad execution. I expected much better from this writer.
