Jessie - Lori WIck

Often, after I finish a Lori Wick book, I promise myself I'll never buy another one. I did that tonight. I may end up breaking my promise to myself yet again, but that was the feeling that Jessie, the third novel in the Big Sky Dreams trilogy, left me with.

As usual, Wick has a wonderful plot premise here. After a brief, tension-ridden marriage, Seth abandons Jessie and their infant daughter Hannah, unaware that he has also left Jessie pregnant with their second child. Jessie goes on with life, raising her girls, and running her store. Eight years pass, and Seth returns, fresh out of prison, a man changed by Christ, determined to make things right.

Wonderful, right?

Wrong.

Wick, in spite of all her great ideas, struggles with writing characters with believable thoughts, personalities, or emotions, and Jessie and Seth might very well be the worst of the lot. They are merely names in a drone of encounters and conversations that might be designed to show their growing love for one another, but fail to impart any sort of emotional reaction in the reader. Jessie, aside from insisting she needs time to 'think' shows no emotion or thought at the reappearance of her husband, and Seth is simply a floating presence who moves improbably quickly back into his family's lives. There is no tension, no excitement, and the inevitable conclusion arrives with all the fanfare of a traffic light turn.

The 'fun' link to another, slightly better, trilogy (Yellow Rose), is actually painful, because it harkens to the most improbable, ridiculous plotline in the whole of that series. The Seth shown in Jessie is not the man from A Texas Sky, changed by Christ, he is a completely different character. The name is the same, that's about it.

Some of Wick's earlier works were very good. Sophie's Heart is extraordinary; I still read it from time to time. Pretense and Bamboo and Lace are still worth picking up, and the Californian series, for the flaws it does have, is an engaging read, providing spunky, lively, well-drawn, (if a little cliche) characters. Even the Kensington Chronicles have something lush and compelling in them, if you ignore the historical improbabilities, and just enjoy the passionate intensity of the characters and the more probable emotional plotlines. But now wonder if Wick has gotten lazy. Her books sell because of her name on them. Good or bad, they will sell, so is it worth the extra effort to make them good? Wick is better than this; she's proved herself as such. And I do hope, in Chestnut Valley Farm, she can live up to her potential. We, her patient and faithful readers, deserve it.

Not Recommended.