Leah
Written on Dec 20, 2011
When it comes to Falling For You, I fall more on the A Sister’s Gift side than the Little Miracles side, sadly. Mostly because the novel is extraordinarily long. Too long, I feel. The beginning was good and it set the ground work nicely, as both Rose and Lawrence go about what is their daily lives. Rose looking after her father, after an accident and Lawrence looking after children in Sri Lanka. However once it gets to Lawrence and Rose trapped in an isolated ruin it seems to go on forever. According to the synopsis Lawrence and Rose are trapped for a mere 48 hours, but it’s so long, so drawn out that it seems like weeks. It really slowed things down and the way Rose continually questioned whether Lawrence liked her and how much she wondered how her Dad was doing could have been boiled down, condensed. I think part of the reason was because how intense it was, and rightly so. It should be intense. This is two strangers in such close comfort, so it should be charged, it should be intense, but at times it got a bit much, I just wanted it to stop snowing!
Call me a cynic (please do, I feel like I’m becoming more and more cynical every day) but while I liked the love story between Rose and Lawrence, while I liked how they spilled their guts to each other, the main crux of the story was treated rather lightly. That’s where the cynic creeps up. I felt Lawrence’s big reveal (which I guessed early on) was treated, by Rose, by everyone, as if it was nothing. That really, really annoyed me. I’m a balanced kind of person, I believe in forgiveness, but I also believe in justice. I believe that it doesn’t matter what Lawrence said to balance out what he did, they were just excuses. If you’re going to write something like what Lawrence did, you need to be realistic in following it through. That really let the book down for me. Because that wouldn’t be the reaction Lawrence gets in real life. Never, ever.
The book had potential, I love the idea of two people who are apparent strangers getting snowed into somewhere. And it was executed well, that part. A bit long, yes, a bit too intense sometimes, but it was good. I liked it. The characters were interesting. Pre-Lawrence’s confession I liked both Rose and Lawrence, Rose was perhaps a bit of an “old” eighteen, but after what she’s been through in her life, it was understandable and the fact she spends her days looking after her Dad does mean she had to grow up quickly. Lawrence, too, was interesting and I loved reading how attached he was to Sunny, a little boy in Sri Lanka.
The writing was good. Not as good as it could have been, with many little errors – dashes and semi-colons in the wrong places, words in the wrong places, just those little annoying things that drive me mad, and that with a little (more) editing could have been rectified. I liked Falling For You, I did. But there were things that made it a bit unbelievable. I thought after all we’d put in with Lawrence and Rose during those 48 hours, we deserved a bit of a longer ending. Or, rather, those 48 hours should have perhaps been shorted to allow more dedicated time to the ending as all of that was done in a bit of a rush. So it was an interesting idea, that was executed well for at least 60%, however 40% of the novel was not as well done. The overly long middle part was the tip of the iceberg, but I would still say that if you’ve enjoyed Giselle’s novels in the past, then Falling For You is worth purchasing. It is an interesting story (and I’d love to know how other people see the big ending), but I did have some issues with it.