Perhaps it was my expectations that doomed this book for me, but then again, maybe not. First of all, it is billed with a paranormal romance, but what..Show More » I got from it was self help psychobabble mixed with Chic Lit.
Yes, there is a couple and they do fall in love, but that's really not the point of the book. In fact, it's almost a side story. There's no buildup, no real courtship and very little conflict between the couple, which are the keystones of a romance novel. No, this book is more about a woman on a path to "self discovery", with the love interest performing more as her guru than her lover. It's flavored with a heavy feminist message, and the enlightenment she is given could come straight from a chapter of "The Secret". So it's all about energy and creating your own reality through belief and positive thinking, that sort of thing.
This book also heavily focuses on "The Yellow Brick Road Gang", a group of friends who seem to have little to no purpose until 3/4's of the way through the book. There's lots of the hand holding female "my friends are my true family" bonding stuff throughout the book, in true chic lit fashion. Frankly, this was the best part of the book for me, and I'm not a real fan of chic lit.
There was also some sort of issue with the audio, causing it to skip in places. While this is not the readers fault, but more a fault of the editing, I still deducted points from the narration since there's nowhere to critique the editing. The narrator was fair, but she was inconsistent at times with the voices of the women (and women outnumbered men in this book by about 6 to 1), and that annoyed me. The only person she was consistent with was an African American character, but she gave her a voice that was stereotypical at best. There were also a number of pauses where pauses shouldn't be.
Bottom line; if you are thinking this book is a paranormal romance in the traditional sense, it's not. It's part "enlightenment self help" and part chic lit. If you are in to that sort of thing, maybe you'll love it. I'm not, and I didn't. Having said that, it wasn't terrible either, so I gave the story a fairly decent score.
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"The Secret" as Chic Lit
