One Summer in Monte Carlo
By Jennifer Bohnet
Published Jan 12th, 2021
ABOUT THE BOOK
You can run to the sun, but can you ever hide? – NEW from the bestselling author of Villa of Sun and Secrets
Monte Carlo means different things to different people; for some it’s a billionaires playground, overflowing with glitz and glamour but for others it’s where dangerous secrets lay hidden.
For Nanette Weston, and her then fiancé, F1 racing driver Zac Ewart, their dream life came to an abrupt halt 3 years ago following a car accident which Zac walked away from, but left Nanette being airlifted back to the UK, never to return and never to see her fiancé again.
Monte Carlo was a place she wanted to forget, not revisit. But when her friend and employer, Vanessa asks Nanette to look after her children in the Principality for a few months, Nanette knew she had no choice but to return.
As the F1 circus once again comes to town, with Zac in pole position, mistakes of the past, leave legacies for the future…
GOODREADS | AMAZON
MY REVIEW
One of my biggest pet peeves in reading is when I feel like a book has a lot of ‘extra’ added to it to meet a word limit. In the case of this read, the author used the characters names repeatedly in conversational lines. If you’ve seen Titanic and heard Rose and Jack call each other by their names in every other sentence, you know what I’m talking about here. At first I thought it was to try and clarify who was talking, but the conversations were not that complex and so the consistent use of names felt forced.
Also, lines or reference points in the stories were repeated unnecessarily several, several times. It’s completely relevant to talk about Nanette being very nervous about running into her Ex or any of their old acquaintances- maybe even a couple of times. But when it comes up once (maybe even twice) in each chapter that focuses on Nanette – that is just too much. To me, it becomes words just for the sake of adding to the word count.
The other real disconnect here for me is that part of the story is focused on Nanette in Monte Carlo while the other is focused on Vanessa in the Amazon. The tie-in does come later in the book but for most of the book, it just felt disjointed in such a way that I never fully was submersed in either part of the story nor in the characters.
Readers who love Chick-Lit with a little adventure and don’t mind the repeating of thoughts, story plot points or character names will probably really enjoy this as both stories do have unique plot lines, which is pretty cool.
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