A Change of Plans is a novella about Ethan and Sara. Ethan is a divorce attorney who is naturally skeptical about all things related to marriage. Sara is fresh off a break up nearly on the eve of her wedding to a man who woke up one day and decided she was just boring. After reading this book, I'm inclined to agree with Sara's ex about her ability to inspire excitement.
Ok, let me just start by saying I almost never read novellas. I like full length novels because I'm nosy and I need lots of information to feel satisfied, the novella format doesn't work for that kind of mindset. My rating of this book is based on my attempt to give the author the benefit of the doubt for my bias against novellas. I can only describe my experience with this book as...weird. The book starts out and Sara is determined to prove that she can be spontaneous and live it up in Vegas. I respect that, I even liked it. But right away, we get a contradiction with Sara because despite her determination, she doesn't even know how to deal with a pawn shop owner. But then wait, in the same scene she morphs back into an assertive woman with a snarky sense of humor. And that right there, it kept happening. Sara is kind of naive and innocent one moment and the next she's snapping out one liners. I know it was supposed to be her thing but it was very confusing and left me feeling like i didn't know who the hell she was.
Speaking of confusing, I just couldn't get a handle on the actual relationship between Ethan and Sara. Right from the beginning i didn't understand why Sara was spending time with Ethan or why Ethan was investing money in giving Sara back her wedding weekend. I absolutely was lost by the time the two get married. How is it a good plan to convince someone that marriage is a bad idea by way of actually marrying that person? Of course you can guess that the plan backfired and Ethan found himself falling for Sara. The problem is that I don't know enough about Ethan to know what he saw in Sara. He is depicted as being mysterious and a little closed off. That's great for developing the story of his interactions with Sara but the readers need more information to develop a connection with Ethan. Because it's hard to connect with Ethan and Sara kept switching personalities, I found it difficult to get into their relationship.
There are some subplots thrown into the book. One of them involves Ethan acting as the divorce attorney in his parents divorce. There was potential for that subplot to give us more information about Ethan but it never happened and I was left feeling just sort of confused.
Totally random side note: Why was Sara wearing those butt ugly clothes? I know she was from a small town but I just could not understand her wardrobe at the beginning of this book.
My conclusion is that the writing of this book was decent, the sex scenes were very mediocre and i couldn't get into the relationship between the main characters. It should've been a fast read but when it gets disjointed, it's hard to stay interested. I walked away from the story feeling like this was an ok book but I couldn't really tell you what the hell just happened.
**ARC copy provided by Publisher**
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