Review of A Very Special Delivery

A Very Special Delivery by Linda Goodnight Genre: Romance

     True love is hard to find. Life is full of misery. When people sabotage their own relationship and create their own misery, it is just painful to "watch". Molly and her sister experienced a tragic misfortune. Sometimes bad things happen in life through nobody's fault. But Molly's sister, Chloe, blames Molly for the incident. She is rude to the point of forcing Molly into seclusion rather than risk seeing her sister in public in this small town, and increasing Chloe's emotional pain with memories of that day. Molly internalizes her sister's blame with a heaping dose of guilt. Molly does such a number on her own psyche that she suffers from panic attacks.

     We also have Ethan, a single father with a past. Everyone has a past and his is no worse than some. Yet this book seems to enjoy making mountains out of molehills while attempting to call it entertainment. The community ostracizes Ethan for his "wild" past. Now let's throw some religion in for "fun". Normally when I run into a book that deals with religion I try to keep an open mind and believe there is something in this book that I need to learn in order to grow spiritually. The only thing that I learned is the hypocrisy of some so-called "Christians". The church members who look down their noses at Ethan because of the life style he had lived when he was young, not for the man that he had become. Chloe refusing to forgive her sister so that Molly quits going to the community church that her sister regularly attends. The situation between Molly and Chloe was heartbreaking and they both felt blame needed to be placed. Since they were "Christians" they couldn't try to blame God for the cruelty so therefore it must have been Molly's fault, since she was the only other person there when it happened.

     It took me FOUR days to read this book that was less than 200 pages. I read fast when I'm interested in a book. This was just painful to experience and was the closest that I ever came to not finishing a book. I always hope that there will be some redeeming quality that I might otherwise miss out on that makes the book not quite so pointless. Granted everyone finally figured out that stuff just happens in life. It's a romance novel after all so of course everything works out in the end and everyone lives happily ever after. This story never really made it past the pointless stage. I can't even give it merit for it's entertainment principles.