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| Return to Summerhouse | 
 enlarge | Author: Jude Deveraux
Publisher: Pocket
Category: Book
List Price: $7.99
Buy New: $0.01
You Save: $7.98 (100%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  (34 reviews)
Sales Rank: 29569
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Mass Market Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 448
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 6.6 x 4.2 x 1.1
ISBN: 1416509739
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9781416509738
ASIN: 1416509739
Publication Date: June 17, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
 summerhouse worth the return September 17, 2008
yay return to summerhouse almost as good as the original book. i liked the format could stand a few more like this one. next time throw in a charming taggart or a montgomery thanks
Good read, but lacking September 17, 2008
I have not read a great deal of her works, but picked this up on a whim. I enjoyed the book, to a point. I think I would have enjoyed it much more had she taken it a step farther and fleshed out what happened with Faith and Zoe, not just a brief summary at the end. I felt almost cheated the way that part was glossed over. But, all in all, it held my attention and was an easy read. Nothing that you had to think too much about, could put down if something came up, but still entertaining enough to keep you interested. Definately what I would call a "summer read".
 couldn't finish August 26, 2008
i agree with "bunnieskill" reviewer. i just couldn't finish this book but skipped ahead. so glad i didn't buy this book, but got it from a friend. big disappointment.
Return to Summer house August 25, 2008
Enjoyable, good read a little of the Montgomery times with the present.
Our preception of a situation, how strongly we attach and how it can influence episodes of our lives! Welcome back Jude!
Trouble in JudeLand August 18, 2008
12 out of 14 found this review helpful
They say there are only so many stories to be told. Certainly in the romance genre, one expects an author as prolific as Jude Deveraux to return to the same well more than once.
Deveraux has set up CAMP next to the well, with a stand selling bottled well water.
Here are two things I wish she'd stop already:
1. Mystery plots. Deveraux is a romance novelist--period. She cannot construct a solid mystery, and the solution always involves some garbage she makes up in the end that no one ever could have surmised from the story. That's like playing Hangman where you make up your own words. She likes to drop coy mentions via her "writer" heroines about how novelists usually don't know what will happen to their characters ahead of time. Yeah, obviously, Jude.
2. Time travel. This really has not worked since "Knight in Shining Armor" and "Wishes," where the plot was linear. This convoluted mess where the heroine goes back in time and lives the reality of someone else who IS her, but ISN'T her, but may be RELATED to her, is a headache.
Does anyone else remember when her books actually had sex scenes? And whole plots about falling in love? That's what I want to read, and not this midlife crisis wish fulfillment that I suspect is the author practicing self-therapy. (A third thing I wish she'd stop is intrusively injecting herself into her books.)
Deveraux borrows liberally and shamelessly not only from her other books, but among storylines within the same series. Two of six heroines in Summerhouse nursed a chronically ill husband while being abused by his thankless parents. Three hooked up with men who were too rich to be an "appropriate" match. (Not just rich. Unbelievably, shockingly rich, with access to limitless funds.) Two played the obsessively devoted wife and mother. Most of them discover that they are talented--prodigiously so--in artistic endeavors they have never tried before, and for which there's no precedent.
The author does attempt to break the mold with the "Goth girl," Zoe, but then fails to flesh out the character and follow through. In fact, all of her characters talk and act the same way once she's introduced them by way of a few stereotypes. Occasionally she'll remind you of their archetype by having them bake muffins or something.
**Spoilers ahead.**
Then there are all the dropped plot threads. How did Amy resolve her personal tragedy that was introduced in Chapter One? Why didn't Faith and Zoe ever get business cards after the significance was underscored? (And couldn't Deveraux have been a little more...writerly about the complicity of Jeanne and Madame Zoya, instead of lobbing it at the reader in one contrived lump?) Madame Zoya's "rules for time travel" are all over the place, and Deveraux does a clumsy job of blending them into the dialogue.
Another reviewer mentioned that the characters tend to interrupt each others' stories and turn the subject to themselves. They sure do, and it makes them all annoying. Not *all* the exposition has to happen as a conversation over various lobster salads and blueberry desserts.
Here's what Jude Deveraux still does well: Picturesque descriptions of other time periods. Clothes, food, shopping, and decor, all of which appeal to women's fantasies. The woman who sweeps in and capably "fixes it all," winning her hero's adoration.
For those reasons, I probably could have forgiven her, until I read that trite stink-bomb of an ending. Once again she does a crash conclusion and crams 50 percent of the story into the final chapters, leaving the reader dazed and betrayed. How the hell did all THAT happen?
A good friend tells you what you need to hear, even when you don't want to hear it. So does a good editor, and Jude Deveraux needs one--that is, if she wants to be great again and not keep banking on her (decidedly) former glory.
Give us back to the Montgomerys and the historical romance formula. It's what made you.
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