{Whatcha Reading?} Secondhand Shoes

I've discovered yet another thing I love about my Kindle -- the ability to send myself a sample of a book  before purchasing it. I'd read a discription of Secondhand Shoes by Shelly Arkon and was intrigued, but not sure if it was worth buying or not since I didn't know anything about the author and there weren't many reviews.  Then I saw that I could get a sample, so I decided to give it a try.

The sample is automatically delivered to your Kindle the same as a regular book  and, in this case at least, it included ten percent of the book. That was more than enough for me to decide that I wanted to keep reading. At the end of the sample, is a link to buy the full book. My only complaint is that it didn't save my place -- the sample and full book are different files on the Kindle, so I had to find the point where I'd left off.

Despite that, it's not a bad system, and it's one I'll definitely use again if I'm iffy about buying a book. I'm not normally a fan of excerpts, but reading the first few chapters and then being able to download the rest of the book immediately works for me.


Would I reccomend this one?  I honestly can't decide. It wasn't what I was expecting. I've been reading so many cozies lately that I think I'm a little sheltered. If I'd been expecting a horror novel, I wouldn't have been so surprised by the characters and events, but this isn't a horror novel. I'm not quite sure what category I'd describe it as.

The shoes didn’t fit. It was an omen.
Eighteen year old psychic-medium-germ-a-phobe Lila should have listened to her ghostly Gram’s advice the morning of her wedding, “Take off that dress and those shoes. And run.”

Back when I was writing romances, we'd sometimes describe heroines as "too stupid to live." It was a trait we tried hard to avoid in our own characters. Lila seems to fit into that category. I still can't wrap my head around how she wound up even dating Max, let alone engaged to him. But she gets smarter as the book progresses and I definitely wanted to find out what happened next. The best comparison I can come up with is when you're watching really trashy reality television and can't turn it off even though you're not sure why you're still watching.  It's definitely some entertaining escapism.

Disclosure (in case anyone actually cares) -- I paid for this one.

This post is linked to Whatcha Reading? over at Patchwork Times.