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Title: Bridges of Madison County meets The Thornbirds
Review: I loved "Secret Life of Bees" and ordered this book on faith, without having read anything about it. Although I enjoyed the sense of place and the creative use of imagery and myth, I found the story itself sappy and the heroine uninteresting. There was nothing new about the empty-nest, mid-life crisis, controlling husband angst, and the love-at-first-site hokeyness of the forbidden romance was unworthy of this writer. Sometimes I wonder about the pressure that the publishing world must place on a new writer to quickly produce a novel that can compare with one that might have taken her years to produce and perfect. I will not give up quite yet on Sue Monk Kidd, but I was quite disappointed in this trite story.
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