BETTER LATE THAN NEVER

Author: Stephanie Morris ISBN: 9781935348313 4/2009 CONTEMPORARY Publisher: AMIRA PRESS

Kristen Smith enjoys working with children and her lifelong dream of opening her own childcare center has finally come true. Everything couldn't be more perfect until her high school sweetheart walks through the front door with his son. Randy Stroud was the one that she'd never gotten over. She never understood why he ended their relationship but it was obvious that he had moved on, and she was more than willing to pretend that she had. But Randy can't let Kristen go again now that he has her back. Will he be able to convince her that it is better late than never?

RRAH's THOUGHTS AND PONDERINGS:

BETTER LATE THAN NEVER just didn’t fill me up—it was like eating a huge meal and then leaving the table still hungry. It was too basic for me. The three sisters were hard to keep track of, i.e. who was who. Usually, by the end you know who’s who in a book; well, at the end of this book I was even more confused than when I first started reading it.

The book had some good moments, but the characters never really developed for me. The hero and heroine had a past—I got that—but what supposedly broke them up was nothing detrimental. It was all really silly.
I do have to give the author credit for trying, though. This is her first published book and she put a lot of work into it, but for me, it just fell way short of what I was expecting.

Because of my confusion identifying the sisters, I’m sitting here now honestly trying to remember which one was the main character; I was that confused. But which ever one she was, she gave in too easily. One minute she was mad and didn’t want to see Randy ever again, the next minute she’s in his arms in a passionate embrace. There was no chase; he should have had to work at winning her back, for what ever the reason was that he lost her in the first place.

When the girls' grandparents came to visit them, they were there for a paragraph and then they were gone. If you take the time to write in characters, then you at least want to make their presence known. It was as if the author wrote them in to take up space in her book.

I would just suggest that for the author’s next book, not to make the characters so agreeable. Let them have conflict that has some real meaning to it.

Sheila Smith