Jude Deveraux: Carolina Isle
Carolina Isle
Author: Jude Deveraux
Genre: Romance
Pages: 448
Final Thoughts: Decent, but with some significant holes.
I picked this up because I know my Mom's been reading Deveraux pretty much since I started paying attention to author names, and I've never read anything she'd written. I chose this particular one because I liked the premise - look-alike pen pals decide to pull a switch and, naturally, calamity ensues.
I think my biggest beef with the book is that the cover copy misled me:
Ariel and Sara never imagined their high-spirited attempt to step into each other's shoes would cause such upheaval. The lifelong pen pals, who look exactly alike, meet for the first time in their twenties and embark on a daring adventure of changing identities. Southern belle Ariel is determined to win the heart of a man who doesn't know she exists, while Sara yearns to leave behind her hardscrabble existence and taste the good life that fate has denied her. But in pretty Arundel, North Carolina, nothing is as it seems -- including the dangers that are closing in on their new dream lives, as the deepest of fears and darkest of secrets and betrayals come to light.
Ariel and Sara aren't just lifelong pen pals - they're actually cousins who grew up without knowing one another until one sought the other out and they started writing clandestine letters. And then, the whole identity switch thing lasts all of five hours in the storyline - all the people who matter see through it right away.
And then doesn't it sound like we're going to be moving in the remnants of Southern High Society in Arundel, NC? Nope, sorry. The bulk of the book actually involves a convoluted treasure hunt on a nearby island filled with people who are only nominally aligned with the US - they're still "tea-drinkers", i.e. they wish England had won the Revolutionary War.
And the capper (for me) was that one of the dual romantic storylines got short shrift. We left them, one with a broken leg, the other with a shotgun pointed at his face, in a cave they fell into, still antagonistic and/or clueless about their romance; we go away to focus on the other couple for a while, with satisfying results, and then return to find the first couple under no threat from shotgun-man (who was outside the cave) and they've slept together and are, to all appearances, blissfully in love. Zuh?
And then the epilogue was long and cheesy.
It wasn't a terrible way to pass the time, but I just wasn't all that impressed. But most of the other reviews I poked through seem to point in the direction of "this isn't her best". Maybe I'll find one that's supposed to be good and see how I feel about that.
Book #16