Story for the Week
Attraction is subjective.
I recently had a conversation with my teenage daughter about singers and actors who I liked when I was young. I was (and still am) a huge Donny Osmond fan. 🥰 I think I cut out every picture of him and Shaun Cassidy from all the teen magazines I could get my hands on and created a collage on my bedroom wall. When Donny starred in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, I saw it four times when he performed in Chicago.
My sister and I are only two years apart, we grew up in the same house with the same parents and went to the same schools (obviously), but she was more a fan of Leif Garrett and Rex Smith, and Parker Stevenson was her favorite Hardy Boy. She wasn’t a big Donny fan, but she did go with me once to see Joseph—although I think it was the show she was drawn to and not the star.
When I showed my daughter pictures of all of these teen idols, she didn’t think any of them were attractive (as if!), and she asked, “What was with all the long hair?!” She clearly has no sense of what long hair means, so I showed her a picture of Matthew and Gunnar Nelson in their heyday. Despite the fact that she has half of my DNA, I think she was horrified. 😮
Obviously, attraction and taste aren’t just about whether you think someone is good looking or what your type is. My mother and sister love green bell peppers, will eat them raw. I don’t like them at all. I can’t stand sour cream. When I was a kid and my mom was cooking beef stroganoff Hamburger Helper, she would call me to spoon out what I wanted before she added the sour cream. My husband loves shrimp and all kinds of seafood (he DID grow up in the Caribbean), and I just don’t. When my brother-in-law moved in with us, I finally had someone else in the house who likes asparagus.
I like rum but despise tequila. I like pop music but not rap. I liked studying English but not history. I prefer football to soccer (much to my husband’s chagrin).
When it comes to romance novels, everyone’s tastes are different. Some women (and yes, I say women because they make up the majority of romance readers—again, taste) prefer the graphic erotica and some would rather skip that and stick to the romance. I recently read a novel that a majority of readers liked based on the 4.5-star rating on Goodreads. It wasn’t my thing, but you might love it.
Book Review
⭐⭐
2 Stars for An Everyday Hero by Laura Trentham
327 pages
Publisher: St. Martin’s Griffin
Publication Date: February 4, 2020
I received an advance copy of this title from NetGalley and St. Martin’s Griffin.
Publisher’s Description
At 30, Greer Hadley never expected to be forced home to Madison, Tennessee, with her life and dreams of being a songwriter up in flames. To make matters worse, a series of bad decisions and even crappier luck lands her community service hours at a nonprofit organization that aids veterans and their families. Greer cannot fathom how she’s supposed to use music to help anyone deal with their trauma and loss when the one thing that brought her joy has failed her.
When Greer meets 15-year-old Ally Martinez, her plans to stay detached and do as little as possible get thrown away. New to town and dealing with the death of her father in action, she hides her emotions behind a mask of bitterness and sarcasm, but Greer is able to see past it and recognizes pieces of who she once was in Ally. The raw and obvious talent she possesses could take her to the top, and Greer vows to make sure life’s negativities don’t derail Ally’s potential.
After Greer is assigned a veteran to help, she’s not surprised Emmett Lawson, the town’s golden boy, followed his family’s legacy. What leaves her shocked is the shell of a man who believes he doesn’t deserve anyone’s help. A breakthrough with Ally reminds Greer that no one is worth giving up on. So she shows up one day with his old guitar, and meets Emmett’s rage head on with her stubbornness. When a situation with Ally becomes dire, the two of them must become a team to save her—and along the way they might just save themselves too.
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Laura Trentham’s An Everyday Hero is a sweet story about second chances, touching on the aftermath of war on veterans and their families. I know there are people who love this book based on some other reviews, so I will focus first on what I like before I talk about what makes this only 2 stars for me.
Greer Hadley has returned home to Madison, TN, after failing to become the superstar she thought she would be in Nashville. Too many stories make it seem like it’s easy to make it big, and this character has experienced the tough side of the music business—tending bar to make ends meet, pawning her possessions to pay the rent, NOT making it big and having to figure out her plan B.
I also like the realistic story lines of Ally Martinez and Emmett Lawson. Ally is a teenager acting out after losing her father in combat, and Emmett was the hometown high school football golden boy who lost his leg in combat and has returned home feeling the survivor’s guilt and not like a hero at all. Their emotions and reactions are exactly what you would expect from people in their situations.
We know going into this (it is a love story after all) that Greer and Emmett will end up together, and I enjoy their interactions, although they feel a lot younger than their 30 years.
That’s the extent of what I like.
The main thing I don’t like is the author’s writing style. I like a good simile or metaphor as much as the next person, but this author is so over the top with them that it borders on ridiculous FOR ME. I started highlighting all the examples about 25% of the way through because they are so distracting, and some of them don’t even work well.
- “His face was a dark blob, and as if she were answering a Rorschach test, she said the first thing that popped into her head….”
- “Greer scooted back in her chair as if the guitar were weaponized.”
- “….anticipation burned through him like he’d injected whiskey straight into his jugular.”
- “Terrance was a bear of a man who attracted women like a beekeeper attracted bees, utilizing a smoke show to get their honey before leaving them with broken hearts.”
There is one glaring error that a book about a musician should not miss that I hope was fixed in editing. The reference is to the song “Imagine” being by The Beatles. This was written by John Lennon long after The Beatles went their separate ways.
***SPOILERS*** SPOILERS***SPOILERS***
The other thing that doesn’t work for me is the way the author makes it seem like Madison and Nashville are so far apart. Part of Greer’s back story is that she doesn’t make it in Nashville. At one point, she pawns her prized guitar to pay her rent. And when Emmett goes to every pawn shop he can find between Madison and Nashville to buy back Greer’s guitar for her, it seems like it’s quite a drive—I imagined a couple of hours at least. But then I Googled it. Center to center, Nashville and Madison are 9.5 miles apart. Why on earth would Greer pawn her Dolly-signed Martin guitar to pay rent when she could have gone home?!?! I get that she was trying to make it on her own, but this was her prized possession, and I just couldn’t believe that she would make that kind of a sacrifice.
I also guessed long before the reveal that one of the men that Emmett lost in combat turns out to have been Ally’s father. What I can’t believe is that Emmett doesn’t already know this since Madison is portrayed as a typical small town where everyone knows everybody else’s business.
I am certain there will be plenty of readers who will absolutely love this book. As I said, the story itself is a sweet one that I would have enjoyed more if not for the author’s style, which just isn’t to my taste.
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