Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Wild Orchids by Jude Deveraux

Where to begin with this one? Ahhhh! Perhaps I should explain my trepidation at even picking this book up to begin with. Years and years ago I spend much time loving Jude Deveraux's books (I was in my late teen's/early 20's). I loved them so much I even created a Geocities site proclaiming these grown up fairy tales as some pretty special romance books. And then something happened. Her books started to become less romance, more new-agey. Lots of psychic type stuff and past lives and things I'm generally not interested in and fell pretty icky about. I just couldn't read her books anymore. I took down the website. I gave all the books away to a local bookseller and I moved on.
So why now? Why would I pick another one of her stories? Well, I was wandering through my local library this week. I knew whatever I picked had to be a quick read as we're getting ready to move on Monday. It had to be something that I could glance at in between boxes and cleaning things out and still know where I was in the story (nothing heavy). For some reason this title stood out to me from amongst the shelves. I thought, why not? It didn't sound like there was any psychic stuff involved, it was about a widower writer and his research assistant. So I started to read. It stayed pretty basic and enjoyable for the first half. And then wouldn't you know it the occult element entered in halfway through. No past lives or ghosts, but a devil story instead. I wouldn't have a problem with a devil story if the theology of it wasn't so off. See I really enjoyed C.S. Lewis' Screwtape letters (written by a devil) but the theology behind it was correct. It wasn't in this story. So I can't really recommend this one. It served its purpose, an easy read for me and that's about it.

1 comment:

Tracie Yule said...

That's too bad to hear. I used to love Jude Deveraux as well, but then my reading preferences changed. I've been thinking about picking up another romance novel...not sure which though. Not Jude Deveraux, obviously :)