Details:
Pages: 376
Edition: Kindle
Publisher/Date: Bramagioia Enterprises (June 29, 2011)
Price: $2.99 on Amazon
★★★★★★★★☆☆
When I started Twenty-Eight and a Half Wishes, the first in the Rose Gardner Mystery series, I had doubts whether I’d like it. Some of the reviews I’d seen criticized the main character, Rose, for being simple minded and that the story was too unbelievable. For me, it was more the simple mindedness that had me worried. Unbelievable? It’s about a girl who has visions and is filed under the “Fiction” label. I think that allows for a little farfetchedness.
The first few pages didn’t do much to dispel my fears. Rose is the definition of meek. She’s nice, polite, and her most offensive expletive is “crappy doodles.” She’s 24 years old and, when she’s not working at her mindless job at the DMV, she’s at the beck and call of her religious mother (who is downright abusive and tells Rose she’s possessed by the devil because she gets “visions”). While Rose doesn’t like her situation, she seemed apathetic to changing it.
If the story continued that way for too long, I wouldn’t be saying this: I really liked Twenty-Eight and a Half Wishes. Despite the uncertainty in the first few pages, Grover Swank didn’t waste any time allowing Rose to bloom (pun fun).
While at work, Rose gets a vision of herself lying dead on her sofa and faints. Faced with (potentially) her death, she realizes she’s never really lived. She stands up to her demanding mother and storms out of the house to cool off. Before she returns, she takes out a Wal*Mart receipt and begins to make a list of things she wants to do before she dies. Commit all the deadly sins in one week, fly in a plane, dance in the rain, visit Italy, drink a beer (is it shocking that the item that made me wince was that she’d never drank a beer?).
When she returns home, she realizes she’ll have more time than she thought to check off items on the list. Her vision sort ofcame true, except instead of Rose being on the couch it was her mother.
Unfortunately, gossip spreads fast and the fact that Rose had fought with her mother right before her mother was murdered hasn’t gone unnoticed – especially not by the old busybody across the street and the small-town police officers. Not only is Rose a suspect, but it becomes clear the murderer is still after her.
Rose must do her best to keep out of jail and stay alive. After all, she has a list to finish.
Obviously, there’s the standard “Woman gets accused of murder. Real killer pursues woman. Police are corrupt/unmotivated. Woman must solve crime to save her life” crime element that is present in so many novels in this genre, but in this circumstance it seemed to serve mostly as a vehicle for Rose’s development. And that was a good thing, because Rose really grew on me (I swear that pun was accidental).
Her home life may have kept her naïve and down trodden, but Rose wasn’t stupid. Socially awkward? Yes. But that just made her more endearing. It made you want to cheer for Rose – not just to solve the mystery but to experience life. When she got a makeover and purchased some new clothes, I was excited for her. Rose felt like a truly good person and she deserved to feel good about herself!
So much of my enjoyment of this book came from Rose checking things off her list. For example, her sitting on the porch with Joe and discovering beer for the first time (and, the next morning, discovering that beer wasn’t her new best friend). Oh, and buying the scandalous nighty at Wal*Mart (which didn’t sound all that scandalous)...too funny.
Of course, you can’t review one of these books without mentioning the “love interest.” Even though I’ve been loving the hell out of these books (they’re a fun way to wrap up my “100 books a year” reading challenge), I’m not a big romance person. I know, I’m probably the only one who reads these kinds of books and feels that way, but I can usually tolerate it as long as it doesn’t take over the plot.
I’m happy to say that, in this book, the romance was actually pretty tolerable. Probably because there wasn’t a ton of it and, you know, with Rose so innocent and inexperienced, it wasn’t going to go all 50 Shades of Grey. Joe was plenty mysterious, but, for the most part, I couldn’t help feeling like he was a good guy. It was clear he wanted to keep Rose from getting hurt, but he never tried to make her decisions for her. In fact, he may have been one of the few people in her life that wasn’t.
The ending itself wasn’t all that shocking, but I barely noticed because of how it ended. Just when I thought Rose and her antics couldn’t get any better, they did. I was laughing at one sentence and cheering at the next.
This maybe one of the best (if not top) feel good books I’ve read. I liked that.
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