Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #16541 in Books
• Published on: 2006-08-18
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 416 pages

Customer Reviews

Read in a Day
I loved this book it was so hard to put down. Luckily i was on holiday so i had the chance to read it in a day. I had just finished reading another really good book and was worried this was going to be a come down but this outshone my last read by miles!!

The Shop on Blossom Street
Thoroughly enjoyed this book and the inclusion of a knitting pattern which I will work on just as soon as I can get a translation of the different knitting terms and needle guages. In fact I am in the process of buying the whole series of Debbie McComber books. I have all of the Blossom Street novels to date and am about the begin reading the Cedar Grove series. I can thoroughly recommend the five I have read so far.

Trite
I honestly don't remember if I read something that trite ever. From the very first pages, I had the feeling I was before a "packaged" product, whether the agent of that packaging is some "writer's software", or some other assembly-line system of writing that spits out one formula after the other.

And, as if that were not enough, the content itself is a series of cliches strung mercilessly one after the other.

The women in this book are mostly the "wait-for-your-man-and-cater-to-him" type, with nauseating cliches about their magic works in the kitchen, women who say things like "a man I could lean on", women who "make meals to please their husbands", women who are distraught they "disappointed their husbands" because they couldn't bear them babies.. etc..etc.

So, the author seems to believe it is just that type of woman who would be into knitting, repeating the old (and ignorant) stereotype about knitters as a species.

Then, the author keeps repeating writing about events she'd stated, over and over again like she'd forgotten she already mentioned them, and my question is: did she not revise even once? Where was the editor??

As if that were not enough, she over-explains everything like she she's writing to dimwits who have to have everything spellt out and repeated to them in every possible way in order for them to "get it"!

As for her dialogues, I found myself constantly wondering, "WHO ON EARTH SPEAKS LIKE THAT???"

Cliched words, cliched situations, cliched men and women, cliched stories and cliched endings... Smacks of some "machine-writing" to me... maybe a new writing wiz that you feed a few keywords the way you put in a search engine and it vomits a story out to you. But then again, I could be wrong about the machine, and this story could be the product of that author's imagination... which would be infinitely worse...

There is but one redeeming feature in this book, however, aspiring writers could use it as a way to learn how NOT to write, its merit lies in its instructive value as a perfect specimen of dreadful writing.