Author :: I'm a believer
Publisher :: Black Swan
Rating :: (out of 5)
Recommendation :: Don't buy it unless you're a romance fanatic!!

:: Full Review
I seriously think giving this book a 2 stars out of 5 stars is an over-rating. But giving it 1 star is not too fair. Maybe it's a tussle between 2 star and 1 star. Give it 1 and half star? Nah, I think I will be a little generous to the author.

What made me pick up this book in the first place was its interesting write-up at the back cover. To me, it sounded like something I would like to read about. Mark (the main character in this book) is a science school teacher who leads an ordinary life with nothing interesting to say and do almost all the time until his girlfriend dies, Catherine.

Then, he started receiving funny phone calls and his microwave oven starts talking to him and the notion of life after death seems possible after all when it occurred to him that his dead girlfriend was trying to talk to him, to reach him via the mental and spiritual method.

It sounded so....enticing.

But the contents were less so.

To be fair, the first half of the book was good. It was so good that I didn't want to put it down. The first half tells of Mark's extraordinary encounters with the 3rd kind...the spiritual third kind. His microwave oven started to speak to him by saying 'hello', his phone rang and no one spoke. It sent chills up my spine. I love to be excited like that! I love anything strange and unknown to the protoganist...etc.

Then...it started to get boring towards the end. It seems as though the poor writer, Jessica Adams, lost her will to write more ghostly stories or how to turn her wonderful mysterious love story into something more. She completely decided to turn around and write a different story....a love story.

The 2nd half of the book, I was merely leafing around the book, trying to find the word 'Catherine' so that I can read more mysterious encounters about it. But nope, there was none to be found. There were stories about he and his good friends, how his good gay friend wanted to be more man and how his strange-looking, slightly overweight female colleague got her man....etc. Boring stuff like that. The Mills and Boons kind, you know.

It's not that I don't like love stories...I seriously do. I read love stories all the time. I love books and read anything I can...although much less now. But what I got out of the book was not what I expected it to be.

Maybe it's the publisher and editor and copy-writer's fault and not the writer's after all. Cause the back cover and synopsis of the book gave me a different impression and the inside of the book was a love story about how his dead girlfriend tried to fix him up with this new girl (a teacher too) in school cause they are meant to be together.

Towards the end, it was a good ending for Mark and his new girlfriend but hey, don't just cut Catherine out of the picture like that. Towards the end, the writer never even mentioned Catherine at all. Most of the time, Catherine couldn't get through to Mark because he was too stressed out. Accordingly, in order for ghosts of spirits to communicate with you, you need to be in a certain state of mind...not stressed out or sad or anything like that....which can be true.

But since Mark has found a new love and he is calmer and happier, wouldn't that make it easier for poor dead Catherine to 'get through' to her lover? Wouldn't it? And giving Catherine such a lackluster goodbye to Mark makes Mark seem to indecisive and so disloyal to his ex-girlfriend. It makes me want to think "Hey, Catherine's dead and they didn't like...you know, break up or anything, right? So, theoratically speaking, this TESS girl (the new girl) is like a 3rd party or something.

It doesn't make it any better when Tess is such a tight ass about things, a hard core Christian and goody-two-shoes. In the end, Tess gave up Christianity or was became less fanatical about Christianity or something like that. But that's just a way to make it less sinful for Tess to cohabit with Mark. After all, it might offend some people if the writer writes about a Christian who lived with a person of the opposite sex and sleep with him and all that, right? So, it seems so convenient but it doesn't make any sense at all.

:: I'm a believer - Jessica Adams