The Marriage Pact by Michelle Richmond
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
The view was not worth the climb.
First of all, let me be clear – I received an advanced reader copy of this book from NetGalley in return for an honest review. I may never receive a free copy again after this…
In all seriousness, I wanted to like this book. I really did. I saw that the author was a New York Times Bestseller with a major publishing company and I expected a really polished read. This was not that. I can only hope, for the sake of everyone involved, that what I read was either an unedited or unproofed copy of the manuscript because it was very rough. I counted four mistakes in one sentence. Four. That alone is normally enough to turn me off, but I was determined to get through it because I felt an obligation to do so.
Initially, I was drawn into the book. The premise of a signed contract with an organization whose objective is to help support and protect the institution of marriage is an interesting one. But at some point near the middle, the pace of the book slows down and I found myself repeatedly checking the count at the bottom of my Kindle to see how much farther I had to go before the plot started wrapping up. Again, a good edit to cut some of the fat would likely go a long way to resolving that issue.
My biggest issue is that after I had waded through the murky middle bits of the book and my trusty Kindle led me to believe that I was nearing the finish line, the ending was somewhat predictable, brief, abrupt and unsatisfying. There is a very long windup for how few pages are actually dedicated to the conclusion of this story. I’m not a gal who needs a happy ever after ending, but I do prefer some sort of clearly defined ending. Complete cliffhangers, especially when it’s not written to be part of a series, leave me feeling like I wasted my time. For as emotionally invested as I became in the characters and their story, not having a concrete ending just frustrated and annoyed me.
Bottom line: This one was not a good use of my time.
