Love and a Bad Hair Day

Rating:
Summary: Brit Lit with Southern Flair
Review: Being an avid chick lit reader, I stumbled onto this book after many reading mostly British authors and unfortunately a bad hair cut. The summary on the back cover is not reflective of the novel, so don't expect many of bad hair days or much else of what the back cover suggests. Like almost all chick lit, it hits all emotions and has a happy ending. The southern attitude and way of life was a great break from the londoners that I am used to reading about. It is a great summer read, and a curl-up-in-bed read that I am sure you will enjoy. You'll fall in love with the main characters.

Rating:
Summary: Small town romance, slow paced read
Review: Jolene Hadley Corbett has been lusting after Ryman O'Malley since she was fourteen, when he accidentally touched her bare breast while trying to save her from drowning in his grandfather's pool. There's only one slight problem: their two families, the Hadleys and the O'Malleys have been feuding for generations. And this isn't a simple misunderstanding, it's escalated to the point where every gift shop in Verbena, North Carolina sells t-shirts with the slogan "I Survived the Hadley - O'Malley Feud!".

Yet when his grandfather dies, and Ryman becomes the new owner of the South Winds Trav' O' Tel' and returns to Verbena, Jolene is forced to face the man she's been dreaming about for twenty years. If there's one thing Jolene hates more than anything else, it's change, and Ryman's return to town signals nothing but! Will the two be able to get past their feuding families and generations of "bad blood" in order to live happily ever after?

LOVE AND A BAD HAIR DAY is written from the first person perspective, giving us only Jolene's point of view. This is rare in a romance novel (and don't be fooled, even though LOVE AND A BAD HAIR DAY may look like a chick-lit novel, it's really not). There are a few editorial mistakes in the book which should have been caught, such as the sudden shift from first-person to "she" or even "Jolene". I doubt the author was trying to get her main character to refer to herself in the third person, as this only happens a few times throughout the book and seems severely out of place. Jolene herself is hard to identify with at times, as she whines, complains and does her absolute best to pick a fight with Ryman every chance she gets - even though she's thought of him constantly over the last two decades.

Even so, if you like your romance with a heavy emphasis on families and Southern small towns, and you don't mind a slow paced read, this book will definitely appeal to you on some level. And truth be told, Ryman is a hunk of a hero, the epitome of the Southern gentleman, which definitely makes up for most, if not all, of Jolene's character flaws.

Rating:
Summary: sweet and touching
Review: This was a funny and sweet story about two people falling in love, but also having to negotiate their lives within the demands of their families. I found it to be an incredibly enjoyable and fast read.