Title: Sleepless in Manhattan Series: From Manhattan with Love #1
Author: Sarah Morgan
Published: May 31, 2016
Genre(s): Romance: Contemporary
Page Count: 464
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:Cool, calm and competent, events planner Paige Walker loves a challenge. After a childhood spent in and out of hospitals, she's now determined to prove herself—and where better to take the world by storm than in the exhilarating bustle of Manhattan? But when Paige is let go from the job she loves, she must face her biggest challenge of all—going it alone.
Except launching her own events company is nothing compared to hiding her outrageous crush on Jake Romano—her brother's best friend, New York's most in-demand date, and the only man to break her heart. When Jake offers Paige's fledgling company a big chance, their still-sizzling chemistry starts giving her sleepless nights. But can she convince the man who trusts no one to take a chance on forever?
Oh dear. Aside from a few chapters in the middle that were truly unputdownable, Sleepless in Manhattan was actually more of a snooze than anything else. Primarily, Sarah Morgan’s prose and storytelling are haphazard and graceless. Also, the bare bones of the plot itself were just…asinine. This book reads like it was written by someone without any particular talent, just stringing together paragraphs through bullheaded determination alone. Which is admirable, but messy to read.
Not even kidding, the entire conflict could have been wrapped up in a few pages if only all of the characters had sat down for a 30 minute conversation about their feelings. (Which is amusing, since there was a lot of sitting around and talking in this book, just all of the talk was pointless.)
Don’t believe me? Here’s what up.
Paige fell in love with Jake as a teenager. Jake reciprocated, but had promised Paige’s overprotective older brother to “stay away” from her. So he turns her down and she’s humiliated. Now everyone’s 30-ish. The only thing stopping Paige and Jake from being together is that Jake made that promise and Paige believes Jake’s rejection of her was genuine.
Mmmkay.
Pretending that we’re all grownups, this could be solved very quickly. I’ll demonstrate. Ready?
Jake: Hey, I lied when I said I wasn’t interested. I totes am, but I’m a Bad Person and your big bro made me promise to stay away.
Paige: Uh, not okay. How about everyone respects me and lets me decide for myself what is and is not good for me? Also, you should consider therapy for your Massive Childhood Trauma.
Jake: Cool.
The End
See? Super easy, right?
But oh no, Sarah Morgan had to take 400 pages of my valuable time to solve problems that shouldn’t have existed in the first place. I can’t. I just can’t.
I understand that the whole “forbidden” sibling of a best friend trope is not my thing in general, but it comes across as so ridiculous in this book especially. The reason Paige is off-limits to Jake is because he’s a Bad Boy who doesn’t believe in love. Because after his mother abandoned him when he was six he doesn’t believe that love is real. (Never mind that he’s had healthy parental relationships modeled in his life ever since then. This is Romancelandia and things never make sense.) That’s just…a really stupid, overblown obstacle that’s just tossed into the plot willy-nilly. It doesn’t even hold up under logical examination. None of this book does.
It’s all just so boring and tedious. For instance, literally nothing happens in the first 100 pages of Sleepless in Manhattan. Paige and her 2 best friends lose their jobs and they spend a long time talking about it. That’s all. The author does this thing where she starts a scene, then meanders around explaining a bunch of random shit that is only tangentially related, before she finally arrives back to the topic at hand. Any given scene is thusly expanded to two or three times its necessary length because of all the pointless crap.
For instance, I don’t need to know that complete backstories of Paige’s friends because they each have their own novel that’s just going to repeat all that information later. I also don’t need to be continually teased by the ~mysterious~ circumstances regarding some person named Matilda who doesn’t play any part in this story at all, except that she’s the protagonist of the series’ novella, Midnight at Tiffany’s.
Now, I understand that this is a romance that offers more than a basic “hero + heroine + drama + sex = HEA” plot, but Morgan wanders around so much that by the time she actually focuses on anything (either big picture or in an individual scene), I’ve already forgotten what’s going on and why I should care. Nobody needs to read 40 pages of people talking about how sad it is they’ve lost their job. And a declaration of love should be a page, not an entire chapter. It’s ridiculous. Sleepless in Manhattan rambles, and it makes a huge production of every single detail, no matter how trivial. In real life, this story wouldn’t be worth 400 pages; I don’t see why it should merit that length in fiction either.
