I was looking for something short to read last night, and I grabbed this one off the TBR shelf. From 1984! Love the feathered hair. (I didn’t buy it until about ten years ago, though – I was a little too young for these in 1984. I was reading Kathleen Woodiwiss back then but I think the appeal of a divorced dad with three teenagers would have escaped me at that age.)
Trouble in Paradise by Jeanne Grant (THH 28)
(1984, Contemporary Series)
Grade: 3.5
Susan fell head over heels with Griff Anderson, and three months later they were married. But was she in over her head with three teenage stepchildren, an interfering ex-wife and a houseful of hamsters? Will she ever regain the romantic life she pictured with her new husband?
This is from the short lived To Have and To Hold series, about married couples. THH was such an odd series line. The stories were interesting and they had some great writers, but they weren’t always romantic. This one focuses more on the kids than on the romance. However, it had some good points (along with some bad ones). Jeanne Grant is an excellent writer and the story moved along well. The characters were interesting – even the kids, and I don’t normally like kids in my books. However, the book was full of cliches (even in 1984 these were cliches.) The “evil ex-wife”, the “kids with their crazy music”, the “oops, you mean sex leads to babies?” storyline. All of those things made the book feel more like it was set in 1954, not 1984. Overall, it had its good points, but the flaws made it feel very dated.
I have a surprising number of series books from the 80’s in my TBR pile. (About 40 of them.) The old series books started disappearing from the used bookstores in the late 90’s, and I grabbed a bunch of them so I would get them before they were gone. Most of them are dated and not that great, but it’s a little sad to think they’ve all ended up in landfills or recycling bins.
Karen Wheless
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