The Sweetest Hours: Love Stories...of a Kind: Laura Pedersen
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By turns sweet, sappy, silly, and sad, the stories in this slim POD collection all focus on love of one sort or another. Each one tries to romance the reader in its own way, so reading through them is rather like hurtling rapidly through a series of relationships, some tender and successful and some that leave you scratching your head and wondering what on earth you were thinking.
Perhaps suburban girls swooning after suburban boys will care about the clumsy lifeguard-camp counselor courtship in "Second Nature," and when they become suburban spouses on the brink of divorce they'll find solace in the slowly healing marriage in "Forth and Back." I'm a quirky urban girl, so the quirky ones appealed to me the most: "Love Lucy," wherein a man tries to figure out whether to leave his fiancée for a dolphin, and "True to Her Word," the tale of a woman who inherits a small-town bookstore and discovers that her patrons' choices of reading material offer windows into their souls, are particularly charming. Pedersen's range is admirable, but she might do better picking a target demographic and sticking to it, at least choosing her audience book-by-book rather than story-by-story. On the other hand, there's something here for everyone, or at least everyone who likes chick-lit.
Much to my surprise, the collection does bear rereading. When I paged through it in preparation for writing this review, a couple of weeks after my first reading, I remembered all the stories and even found myself wanting to linger on a few of them. At first it seems very fluffy and lo-cal, an impression that the cover image of a gum-bubble-blowing thirtysomething in curlers does nothing to discourage; clearly this is supposed to be a bored housewife's guilty pleasure. But there's a kindness here--towards characters, towards readers--that I find much more appealing than the current trend of replacing wit with wisecracks and sympathy with sardonic bitterness, and that kindness will keep readers coming back with no feelings of guilt whatsoever.
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BookSurge (POD)
ISBN 1-4196-1689-7