As I posted in my status updates, I just couldn’t put up with the abuse the Heroine was receiving at the hands of this author (and the delight the “Hero” seemed to be taking in these mishaps). Falling into a mud/manure pit. Tumbling down a hill. Tripping over her laptop cord. “Walking into doors, pouring juice into her lap, dropping stuff—you name it, she’d probably done it” (Kindle p. 194). While she’s klutzy and ends up covered in mud/manure or he’s laughing at her for being covered with grass after taking a tumble down a hill (while trying to intervene in a bad situation he was in), when he falls into a pond, he’s compared to Mr. Darcy’s wet-shirt scene from Pride and Prejudice. In other words, her mishaps make her laughable/worthy of humiliation; his make him sexier and worthy of admiration. No thanks.

However, the abuse of the heroine wasn’t the only problem I had with this novel. The conflicts—her weird is-she-or-isn’t-she-married situation and his run-of-the-mill/cliched evil-ex-girlfriend-ruined-his-life/business backstory—were too complex to try to deal with in a story like this. This would probably have worked better as more of a “road romance” (two strangers fall for each other while traveling and must overcome the conflicts that the “road”—the journey—brings their way) than a “we both have such complicated lives that we cannot talk to each other about anything honest/truthful about our pasts, so, therefore, what’s keeping us apart is our lack of communication” story.

Then, there’s the fact that when I started reading this book, I had no idea it was actually inspy/Christian romance. I was happy that it seemed like a sweet/clean read, since those are rare and hard to find. In fact, up to almost halfway through this book, there was no indication that it was “Inspirational” fiction. Nothing in the book blurb (on the library’s website for the ebook or on Goodreads) mentioned anything about a faith element being part of this book. And, no, I don’t make a habit of looking to see who published a book for an indication as to whether it’s mainstream or religious. (For anyone reading this who doesn’t know me, I am published in the inspirational romance category, too, so it’s not like I have a problem with reading inspirational fiction.) I’ve always been of the mind that fiction with a religious element needs to make it clear in the back-cover copy so that the book doesn’t get a whole bunch of bad reviews from people who read it and then feel like they were “duped” into reading something with a religious message. But I know that could have been a decision by the publisher, not the author, to leave that part out of the blurb.

My problem with discovering that this is “Christian” fiction is that it’s not an organically integrated part of the story/characters. In the first almost half of the book, the only mention of God is when one of the secondary characters randomly asks Allie if she believes in God. And then that’s about all there is to the conversation. It jarred me out of the story completely. Up to that point, it had been just a fun, clean (“sweet”) romance novel—or so I thought. Then, apparently, in the second half, the religious element really takes off; however, I’m relying on having read other reviews to know that, because I didn’t actually make it that far. It would have been nice to have seen this as an element that was woven much more subtly and evenly throughout the whole story, not just the last half.

For the most part, I do like Ms. Isaac’s writing style. However, even with as much as the setting of New Zealand and the inclusion of the Lord of the Rings stuff should have been catnip for me, I just couldn’t bring myself to like it enough to force myself to finish reading it.