Pretty Typical Chick Lit

While I enjoy most romance and chick lit novels, there are two things in most of them that I dislike. Because The Scent of Rain by Kristen Billerbeck has both of these issues in it, I thought I’d just throw them out there. First of all, I realize that the author only has about 300 pages to get her story out there but the whole love at first sight thing is not usually how things happen in real life. Most of my friends who have found their happily every after knew the other person at least a year before anything more started to happen. The other issue I have with these types of books is the ending. If you are going to put an epilogue in, don’t just skip ahead a month or two, tell me how your main characters are doing a couple years (or five years) after marriage. Tell me they have x number of children, have found their dream job(s) and are still as much in love as ever.

OK, now that I’ve got that off my chest, let me say, I enjoyed The Scent of Rain. It was a quick read and the story engaged me fairly quickly. The story was easy to follow and you were rooting for the main character.

Daphne Sweeten has been stood up on her wedding day. She decides to go ahead with a job developing scents for household products (a job at a company her ex-fiance and her were both going to work at). The only problem is that one the day Daphne was stood up, she lost her sense of smell. She now is trying to figure out how to make the job work while keeping all of her new co-workers in the dark about her secret, including her handsome new boss, Jesse Lightner. Jesse and Daphne have an immediate camaraderie and feel comfortable sharing their lives with each other.

Over all, Billerbeck’s novel is a quick, engaging read: the perfect beach novel. I know I complain about the issues I have with chick lit but in reality, I probably won’t stop reading it.

***Thomas Nelson Publishing provided me with a free e-copy of this book in exchange for a fair and honest review.