Sammy’s Hill

by Kristin Gore

ONE LINE SUMMARY: Quirky Samantha navigates politics and love in D.C.

This is an enjoyable book with a good ending, but it took me a while to get into it. The paragraphs are too choppy (perhaps left over from Gore’s stint as a writer on Futurama) and the main character has a few too many quirks and oddities of her personality that make her unrealistic.

In addition, the plot is predictable. Call it Chick Lit–with the “lit’ standing for political, and you have a rehashing of Bridget Jones’s Diary, only with less tension, more artifice, and characters who just annoy you.

It takes Samantha 250 pages to figure out that her boyfriend’s cheating with her, when I had figured it out by their second date. And the guy she ends up with shows up just enough in the pages to remind you that she’s going to end up with him, but apparently not quite enough for the character to know about it until the last fifth of the book.

A promising start, but I wonder if this book had been published had the author not been Al Gore’s daughter. Or maybe my expectations were too high — she has a background of writing, but it doesn’t show here as well as I had expected.

Posted by: ssjane | February 24, 2005 | 10:03 am
Posted in: Books | Fiction Other