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Casey Dembowski

Auteur de When We're Thirty

3 oeuvres 45 utilisateurs 14 critiques

Œuvres de Casey Dembowski

When We're Thirty (2021) 32 exemplaires
The Corey Effect (2022) 7 exemplaires
Get a Room (2023) 6 exemplaires

Étiqueté

Partage des connaissances

Nom canonique
Dembowski, Casey
Sexe
female

Membres

Critiques

Simultaneous developments cause Sarah, Jess’ best friend, and Brian, Jess’ brother, to become homeless. Both are broke, and ask Jess to take them in. She agrees, but there are two problems with this plan. One is that Jess has a two-bedroom apartment, so either Sarah or Jess must sleep on the small couch. The second is that Sarah and Brian have an intense, years-long dislike of each other. While this premise is promising, AUTHOR does a poor job of bringing it to life.

The immediate problem is that none of the characters is portrayed as a likable person. Sarah is self-centered and determined to have her way in every interaction with Brian. She shows no interest in compromise or taking turns. Without provocation, Brian is nasty to Sarah in almost every exchange. And Jess, who is primarily a background character, is autocratic with a demanding personality who establishes inflexible rules. Fifty pages into the book, I was so disgusted with the characters I contemplated a DNF.

Following a fake date arranged so Sarah can embarrass her former boyfriend, Sarah, and Brian begin to feel an intense attraction toward each other. This removes any suspense, so the only question is when and how they will have sex and communicate their honest feelings to each other. Sex came immediately, confronting Dembowski with every romance novelist’s problem: how do you make the rest of the story enjoyable? Turns out, AUTHOR didn’t meet the challenge. They engage in several mundane activities that were boring to read about. But, like a good boy scout, I stayed with the book to the end. I wish I could report the decision was rewarding, but it would have been better to follow my inclination after fifty pages.

One additional but transient problem, perhaps peculiar to me, is the appearance of characters that played a central role in earlier books by Dembowski. As here, they encountered difficulties they had to surmount to find their one true love. In this book, Brian is the boyfriend dumped by the POV heroine of an earlier book I read and the life-long friend of a male POV character in another book. I rooted for these characters and was happy things worked out for them. The heroine, in particular, is portrayed in an unflattering light from Brian’s perspective. I didn’t care for that.?
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½
 
Signalé
Tatoosh | Aug 25, 2023 |
Two college besties made a marriage pact on their graduation day that if they both were thirty and weren’t married they would marry each other!

Hannah was turning thirty and she had a boyfriend that wasn’t going anywhere and she was struggling with ways to break up with him. Someone knocks on her door and they were on one knee with a gigantic diamond asking her to marry him. It wasn’t her boyfriend, it was her college friend Will, whom she hadn’t spoken with in at least 5 years kneeling in front of her!

Surprised is an understatement, but when they both figured they could benefit from this marriage pact, they went to city hall and officially got married five days later!

What could go wrong? They only agreed to remain married for a year, but both families wasn’t buying this whole charade.

Such a cute friends to lovers romcom that breaks all the dating rules! Highly recommend this adorable fun read!
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Signalé
GeauxGetLit | 10 autres critiques | May 27, 2023 |
This is my second book written by Dembowski and she has become a must read author for me. This second chance romance deals with a very heavy topic, but this only magnifies the beauty of this couple.

 
Signalé
GeauxGetLit | 1 autre critique | May 27, 2023 |
I thank Red Adept Publishing for providing an early review copy of The Corey Effect in exchange for an honest review.

The Corey Effect gets off to a slow start. Andrea Scott, the POV character, comes across as shallow, self-involved, and unlikeable. She has long been engaged in an affair with her boss, whose divorce proceedings have been dragging on for three years. Early scenes highlight her emotional volitivity. The story is one emotional drama after another, many of which are overdone. Although the possibility she has PTSD is not mentioned, the idea is sure to occur to readers. Then, once Andrea and her former high school boyfriend, Corey, make contact, Andrea acts entitled and shows no awareness of or respect for boundaries. She acts as if Corey is still her high school boyfriend. She is not a sympathetic heroine.

Even more troublesome is the interspersing of chapters set in the present, with 17 chapters set a decade earlier. The annoying shifts disrupt the flow of the story. The book is a classic illustration of the folly of providing character background in an information dump. The scene-by-scene account of Andrea’s history is unnecessary. Unfortunately, the present story lacks the complexity to stand alone, so the detailed accounting of past events provides the page-filler needed to expand the work into a novel.

Although I did want Andrea and Corey to find happiness together, the ending falls flat. The story is told from Andrea’s perspective, but the conclusion executes a jarring shift to Corey’s point of view.

In an afterword, Dembowski explains she wrote the opening scene in 2009 while enrolled in an MFA program at Adelphi University. Perhaps that explains the awkward structure of the book and the fact that the conversations among characters are awkward.

I enjoyed Dembowski’s earlier novel, When We’re Thirty,, but my recommendation is to skip The Corey Effect.
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Signalé
Tatoosh | 1 autre critique | Oct 26, 2022 |

Prix et récompenses

Statistiques

Œuvres
3
Membres
45
Popularité
#340,917
Évaluation
½ 3.5
Critiques
14
ISBN
5