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Book Club - February

After the success of the January meeting I asked Michelle if she would be interested in joining with me and was looking forward to reading and attending this month's meeting with her. I was really looking forward to going to the meeting with her, we enjoy the same books and enjoy discussing or arguing over them so this was bound to be a good idea. The book for February was "Lady Be Good" by Susan Elizabeth Phillips.

I read reviews for this before I started it and everyone really seemed to like the book and just raved about the likableness and realness of the characters. Then I asked Michelle how she was liking the book, she had started it already. She had a list of complaints. The difference in her reactions and the reviews got me wondering what kind of book I was going to be reading. We have both had different reactions to books so maybe this one would be one of those kinds of books.

I was wrong.

- The Story -
Our leading lady is Lady Emma Wells-Finch the headmistress of a all girls school in England and in the role of leading man is Kenny Traveler bad boy of the PGA. Emma needs to find a way to save her school and ruin her image while Kenny needs to clean his image up, so of course they are a perfect match. It sounds like a good set up for a story, there's bound to be humor and enough background to drive the story forward. For me, what I believe was supposed to be humor caused me to groan, multiple times out loud and throw the book down. They find themselves in awkward situation after awkward situation and it all started to seem forced in an effort to move the story forward.

- The Characters -
Emma and Kenny have the potential to be likable characters but somewhere they fell short. I couldn't find one thing I really liked about them so it made it had to connect and care about the development of their relationship or the story. There was nothing realistic about the relationship or their conversations, they seems just as forced as the plot points. Michelle's main issue was Emma, here is a character who we are told over and over again how smart she is and her big idea to save the school is to ruin her image by getting into compromising situations with Kenny?!? How is that smart? The secondary characters didn't help the story and only made the situations and conversations all the more annoying.

I could go on but I'm going to stop.

- The Discussion -
The meeting was canceled due to snow.

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