Lisa's Reviews > Cover of Night

I have something of an obsession with reading and writing book reviews. And as such, when I find a new author with a big backlog of stories, I often scroll through their books to see how many stars they average. And when I see a book that seems to have gotten disproportionately bad reviews, I can’t help but read a few to find out why. And that was the case with Cover of Night. When I saw its low star count I read all the reviews from people saying the story was boring and unbelievable and in need of a good editor and figured I’d steer clear of this one. Well, that was several months ago and when I was ordering audiobooks from my library I’d completely forgotten about it and just requested all the Linda Howard books I hadn’t yet read. When I started listening to this one my memory was jogged but I figured what the heck? And decided to give it a shot anyway.

The result is one of my rare DNFs. The entire first CD of this book is nothing but boring, repetitious filler. We’re told over and over and over about the heroine’s decision to move to the small town in which she’s currently living. How tight her finances are. How she’s far away from her family but the tradeoff is a lower cost of living. All in long passages of exposition with nothing interesting to break it up. The heroine comes across as aloof and a little stuck up. And when the hero was introduced, he was so not-hero material that I was sure he couldn’t be the hero. He’s described as being so skinny that his overalls hang off of him, so painfully shy that he can’t stammer out a sentence to the heroine without blushing like a school boy, and of such indeterminate age that the heroine at first thinks he’s pushing fifty, (though she later admits that she’d always been so needlessly aloof with him that she’d never actually looked at him closely). That’s such the opposite of what I expect in a hero that I re-read the back of the book, sure that I’d misread it the first time.

And the scenes with the 4-year-old twins deserve special mention because the heroine come across as a crazy, humorless disciplinarian rather than the loving mother her inner monologue repeatedly tells us she is. She comes down on her boys like a ton of bricks for just doing normal kid play stuff and sends them to "the naughty chair" for much longer than their alleged crimes warrant or for any unsupervised 4-year-old to realistically sit through. And the constant conversations where the kids say something and replace their R's with W's and then Cate corrects them and they repeat what they said, this time with correct pronunciation were incredibly irritating to listen to and brought all pacing to a screeching halt.

If I hadn’t already read the reviews for this book telling me that the rest of it is just as bad, I might have hung in there and waited to see if it got better. But everything I’ve seen up to this point says the reviews are totally, totally right. So I’m tapping out on this one.