Ellen Cross

A Hearts On Fire Review

TWO & A HALF STARS--Ellen Cross' "Last Chances" is a short vacation love story about two damaged souls coming together with a Harlequin novel feel. It is contemporary but realistic...*shrug* eh, not really. There was a non-reality quality to the writing with easy guessable plot lines.

The writing quality is good. The romance of it all was okay. It's a diagnosis of insta-love, the romance novel infection strikes again. Achoo!

Jenni is pregnant with what at first she thought was her sister's babies as her sister had infertility issues. Unfortunately tragedy and a sperm-mix up happens to poor Jenni(who's babies are they...two guesses). She now has to raise the babies on her own. So a friend sponsors her on a vacation. And who does she meet, her future de-virginator, Garrick. He too has lead a long, sad road. Together these two in a matter of hours find salvation out of desperate times.

(It's only 70 pages long, so the HEA was already on the horizon from the jump)

The questioning areas for me were: Jenni has been a virgin for 26 years (and still is while being preggo-read the story to find out how this is possible), which is her prerogative, however she gives it up to man she meets with an hour or so. She must have saved it for so long for a reason so the believable factor when she stated she didn't want to just sleep with anyone in order to be impregnated in the past...it frustrated me a smidge.

Then there's the area of Jenni being worried about the press and her relationship with Garrick. She didn't know who he was in the first place, so why would she be worried about creating a scandal with him?

And the dialogue at times felt a little outdated "...poopsie hits the fan-" or "patches on our britches", sometimes it was spot on then phrases like the one I mentioned threw me off. And also some of the erroneous legalities like destroying someone's personal effects without their express consent- it would never fly in the real world.

So insta wedding later, the big 'surprise' was not really a surprise at all. Any loose ends were tied up swiftly.

Bad story?

Nope. Good for a mindless hour or so of no-brainer romance schmoop. It had a fantasy-like feel but it was not a fantasy story at all.

"… (meer)