Gracie and the Bad Hat by Vicki Gaia

TITLE: Gracie and the Bad Hat
AUTHOR: Vicki Gaia
PUBLISHER: Awe-Struck Books
LENGTH: Novel (roughly 67k)
GENRE: Contemporary romance
COST: $4.99

You’re going to notice something different about this review. There’s no breakdown of scores and there’s no summary of the book. I can’t give them. Why? Because I didn’t finish the book.

I tried. I really did. But when the end of the third day came and I had only just finished reading chapter 1, I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to be able to finish the book at all. This doesn’t happen to me very often. I have serious problems leaving things incomplete. I’ve never walked out of a movie I hated, and I’ll sit through the most awful tripe on television just because I have to see it through to the end. And books? I’ve been a voracious reader since the age of four. My elementary school librarians doubled my book allowance because two books wouldn’t get me through the second day, let alone a week.

But I couldn’t finish it. The author’s style never engaged me, and I found a lot of her phrasing very awkward. The story starts out with the heroine Gracie waking up naked in the bed of a man she doesn’t remember, but rather than intrigue me, I get lost in trying to figure out period and place. By the time I finally think I’m starting to figure it out, the two leads are gone, and two new people are in their place, with absolutely no hints of what might be tying them to the first couple. The only thing I think they have in common is the second woman waking up in a strange man’s bed. If there was more, I missed it. It’s entirely possible in my attempts to just slog through the prose, I overlooked that particular detail. I wasn’t even interested enough in the characters to find out what the connection was, or where the humor other reviewers found in the story was. Just not for me.

So…if I had a DNF (did not finish) grade, this one would get it. It kills me to buy it and not get all the way through, but three days for 25 pages? There are too many other books out there begging to be read. Life’s too short for me to ignore them.