Stephanie Jo Loots

The first book that I received to review from WaterBrook Press is Worlds Collide by Alison Strobel.

I told you to fear not. The book hasn’t even started and I have a disappointment to share. The Prologue. Oh, the pointless prologue. It is well written. That isn’t the problem. It’s pointlessness that adds absolutely nothing to the plot is the problem. It says nothing that she couldn’t have simply added to the first or second chapter, or not at all. I’m more in favor of the not at all. It is the backstory of why she is doing what she is doing for a living, and why she chose the assignment with the main characters in the book.

The prologue is also telling instead of showing all of this, and then her first chapter starts the same. Because of the prologue, you assume that the long expository story about how her life is was in the same point of view. It’s not. So suddenly, (this has more to do with book formatting than the author) you have a switch of point of view when the story is interrupted by the actual main character.

With Grace, we hear without seeing, all about her relationship with her boyfriend “at the time”, so right away we know they don’t last and she lists the reasons why it won’t last. Even the active scenes she is just waiting for this horrible relationship that she doesn’t want to be in to end. Then at the end of the day it ends and she cries, because she loves him? No. If you don’t want to in the relationship and don’t even care that for days he hasn’t come home at night, then you aren’t going to care when he leaves either.

We do not need to know every time the woman touches the alarm clock. 

This book is about a woman who listens to famous people’s stories, cuts out what doesn’t need to be in them, and retells them in interesting ways. So please tell me why we are hearing them in the original form from the famous people who don’t know how to tell stories? Plus, when someone sits down to tell you a story about their life, I’ve never heard them mention their alarm clock, or how hungry they were at the time. So be consistent. If we are hearing the stories the way she would hear them, then write them the way people actually tell stories. If you want to show them, (and since she does have a few active scene I think that is what she was attempting) then show the whole story not just random parts.

I finally had some feeling at the of chapter two and a pang here and there during chapter three. All you have to do is say HIV and that happens. She could have had so much more feeling in those two chapters if she would have shown it all instead of stating it like a grocery list. This happened and then we ate and then happened and I felt like this, then this happened. It is so boring. Very emotional things are happening and she found a way to make it boring. His break up with his ex-girlfriend had good emotion in it, but since she didn’t show the emotions up until that point it was muted (or watered down).  Then again, he still wasn’t sure if he loved her, so that might have been what she was going for.

I stopped at chapter six. I tried, but I could not force myself through it. If I wasn’t reviewing this for the publisher, I would have stopped at the first chapter.

Here  is the review I posted on amazon and the publisher website. It says some of the same things, obviously, but in a ‘nicer’ manner.