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Wednesday, October 29, 2003

bummer, I thought I'd like this...

I have been reading Home to Harmony by Phillip Gulley, which was another of the holds the library had waiting for me last night. Amazon.com recommended him to me because I like Jan Karon. At first I was really enjoying this book, but by the time I was a few chapters in I was tired of it. This is mainly due to the Full-House-Cheesiness of his writing style. Remember on the TV show "Full House" (which I actually, truth be told, enjoyed, for the most part), once you'd watched a few of the shows, you could always predict the exact moment that the sappy music would start, near the end of each episode? ("Aw, Steph...") It's like that. The last two paragraphs of every chapter are dedicated to the overly-obvious inculcation of a predictable and sappy moral. You get the idea that the author thinks he's being subtle about it -- but he's, um, not. It's distracting, and makes me inclined to make fun of the book rather than just enjoy it.

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