Book Review: the Inconvenient Marriage of Charlotte Beck

Title: The Inconvenient Marriage of Charlotte Beck

Author: Kathleen Y’Barbo

Charlotte Beck is a childish, self-centered, spoiled rich brat interested only in getting her way. Her looks and her manipulating ways help accomplish that. Alex Hambly is a rich, attractive, astronomer who can stand up to Charlotte’s manipulating and bratty ways. I knew how this story would end before I even finished reading the back cover. Forced marriage, they hate each other, they’ll come to love each other. The end.

I can’t complain about the predictability. I enjoy predictability because my own life is so unpredictable… it’s nice to pick up a book and know how the story is going to end and everything in between.

I liked the book, but it left much to be desired.

Questions still remain such as:

What happened to Charlotte’s mother??? On this point, readers were left with only sketchy details and a confusing story. Did she leave Edwin for Daniel?

Who is Charlotte’s real father?? Edwin or Daniel? The birth certificate said Daniel, but Daniel seemed shocked by this.

This book is classified as Christian fiction, but aside from being clean I fail to see what qualifies it as such. There were two, maybe three, mentions of faith in the whole book – Daniel asking Charlotte about her faith, Daniel addressing it with Alex following that conversation, and Alex asking Charlotte. I’ve seen more about God mentioned in non-Christian fiction.

I enjoyed the setting and the characters were well developed for the most part. If I had not read the acknowledgments at the back of the book, I might have thought that another book would tell the story of Charlotte’s mother; however, this being the last book in the series it doesn’t seem like that will happen.

This book accomplished exactly what I hoped it would… allow me to relax and read while taking some time off work and to get my mind off of more stressful things. That being said this is not a book that I would recommend, nor would I read it again.

*I received this book for free from WaterBrook/ Multnomah Publishers in exchange for writing a free review for their Blogging for Books program*