One Night in Boston by Allie Boniface

TITLE: One Night in Boston
AUTHOR: Allie Boniface
PUBLISHER: Samhain Publishing
LENGTH: Novel (roughly 82k)
GENRE: Contemporary romance
COST: $5.50

Maggie Doyle has twenty-four hours to come up with over $15,000 to save her life as she knows it. That’s how long the bank will give her to come up with her mortgage arrears on her business. If she doesn’t, she loses her house, and most likely, everything she has been working for. With the clock ticking, she turns to the only person she can think of who might be able to bail her out, her estranged stepbrother. The path that leads to him, however, is paved with memories she’d rather not revisit. And a love she’d long thought lost.

I’ve got an interesting dilemma with this book. On one hand, I’ve got an author whose voice sucks you in, is easy to read and has some evocative phrasing. On the other, I’ve got a heroine I dislike so thoroughly that I’m half-hoping through the latter half of the book that she really does lose her house, because, frankly, I think she deserves it. So what’s a reader to do? I’m still not sure.

What’s so wrong with the heroine, you ask? Well, for me, it all started with this mortgage problem. Maggie has an interior design business she runs out of her house and a mother with Alzheimer’s in a nursing home. She’s willing to risk her mother’s care to save a house that she’s only lived in for 5 years. Maggie doesn’t even want to consider having to rent someplace, which never makes sense to me considering how much she supposedly loves her mother. Then, the story of her so-called secret comes out. There’s a night of high school sex that she blames her stepbrother completely for, taking zero responsibility for herself even though she willingly made out with the boy in question, followed by an STD with the unfortunate side effect of giving her cervical cancer that requires a hysterectomy. At this point, Maggie decides she’s only half a woman and undeserving of pretty much any kind of future (which is the sole reason she breaks up with her college boyfriend and the love of her life, because she can’t give him children, oy). Yuck. Somebody else might find her sympathetic, but I didn’t. Self-centered, yes. Sympathetic, no.

The author knows how to write, that’s for sure. Her prose is clean, and the format she’s chosen – breaking the story into hour breaks instead of chapters – is an excellent device to hook a reader in. Just look at how many people are hooked on 24, even when a particular season's storyline might be lacking. I’m a little confused why she would choose a format that’s specifically garners suspense, however, when she uses a good third of the book for flashbacks, and most of the first half is used to set up characters and their relationships. I wondered if it was to fill time on those hours where her heroine was driving or the hero working. So much time was spent on the others, in fact, that halfway through the book, before the full story of the heroine’s background came out, I couldn’t have told you if she was going to end up with the stepbrother – who she stubbornly kept emphasizing was not her brother – or the engaged college boyfriend. The former felt like he had too much story dedicated to him at that point not to be one of the two central players, and the latter was happily engaged to the perfect woman. So happily, in fact, that when he has a change of heart later on, I didn’t buy it. The entire effect is it drags down the pacing. If she wanted a suspense book, she didn’t get it, because there is zero of it until she gets to Boston halfway through the story. If she wanted something else, well…I’m not entirely sure she did want something else, considering the events late in the book.

So where am I left on this story? Kind of middle of the road. I’m not going to read it again – no way am I putting up with Maggie’s self-centered whining again – but the author’s writing style is one of the better ones I’ve seen. She’s one to keep an eye on for now. Hopefully her next heroine isn’t so annoying.

Readability	8/10 – An engaging voice loses momentum with awkward pacing
Heroine	3/10 – It’s next to impossible to feel sympathy for someone who doesn’t take responsibility she should, and makes mountains out of molehills
Hero	7/10 – Charming, even if his turnaround isn’t entirely believable
Entertainment value	5/10 – The author’s voice can’t save my dislike of the heroine or the uneven pacing of the story
World building	6/10 – Solid enough, but nothing exciting here
TOTAL:	29/50