Abandoned by Booklikes

The first novel in Susan Mallery's "Fool's Gold" series focuses on Charity Jones and Josh Golden.

Charity is recently hired as city planner in Fool's Gold. Charity is orphaned and is happy to be putting down roots in Fool's Gold and hopes that she can finally find a nice guy to settle down with after so many dating disasters. Josh is a world renowned cyclist who has moved back to Fool's Gold to recover from a bicycling accident that continues to haunt him.

The initial plot intrigued me but in the end I have to say that I found this entire novel to be a two star book. It really pains me to give this novel two stars. I mean seriously this does. I love Susan Mallery's Blackberry Island series and I am a bit perplexed that the author who wrote those novels wrote the "Fool's Gold" series as well. I purposely chose the first two books in this series for my To Be Read (TBR) 2014 pile because I loved the Blackberry Island books so much.

All in all I felt as if Charity and Josh were very flat, that the plot was patently absurd, and that the romantic chemistry was just not there. However, if only these things were present in the novel I would have still given it 3 stars. However, what really caused me to drop this novel down to two stars was the fact that several times throughout this novel it was shown that being a single woman with a good job was not enough. I several times had to put this book away because of that sentiment that kept being expressed by every single character that came into contact with Charity. She is told at one point to not purchase a home because she may meet a man and if they marry what is the point in having her own home. Several characters keep rhapsodizing about how hot Josh is, how perfect his body is, etc. and these are grown women with careers. I am not saying that women don't gossip (please) but each character was pretty much turned into a drooling imbecile around Josh and it became off putting after a while.

I am going to read book #2 since it is on my TBR 2014 pile and I hope that the series rebounds since in my mind it has to improve from book #1.