Review: Something Wonderful
So I caved and read the rest of the Sequels Series by Judith McNaught; Something Wonderful and Almost Heaven. At first, I wasn’t so keen on these novels as I had read the blurb and it didn’t really suck me in and make me want to read it. However I ended up reading them and thoroughly enjoyed them.
In my previous review of Once and Always I already wrote about the extent to McNaught’s world-building and character building skills which once again present themselves in these novels, so I’m not going to go in much more detail about that sort of thing and I’m just going to go on with the story.
I didn’t actually enjoy Something Wonderful as much as I thought. There were some moments in the novel where I just wanted to strangle the characters because of their lack of judgment and jumping to the wrong conclusions so very quickly. I thought it was kind of cute how Alex ended up saving his life and that’s how they met and such and then they were forced to be married. So just after they get married Jordan Townsende gets kidnapped and taken for a long period of time (about a year) and honestly, I knew he wasn’t dead, because the novel wouldn’t really have a story afterwards. So when he came back, his wife had changed from the child he saw her as to a woman who seduced him. There was a whole misunderstanding between the two and lots of stupid things happened and it just made me roll my eyes. To no surprise, they still ended up together in the end and everything was all right – which I did like.
Alexandra Lawrence is a seventeen year old girl who lives in the country and has no idea about anything to do with the nobility of her time. And in spite of this, I still find it very irritating that she was so goddam naïve and didn’t know anything about anything. Literally after meeting Jordan, she told him that she loved him and she truly believed it and I just wanted to reach into the book and shake some sense into her.
I felt so much second hand embarrassment when she was criticised by the ton and treated by them for not knowing anything about her husband. I was also angry at her adopted family (ie Jordan’s) because they didn’t tell her and although I understood their reasoning for it, I still disagreed with their method. Thank god that she grew up and matured and such and didn’t just fall back into Jordan’s arms when he returned.
And now we’re on to Jordan Towsnende, the Duke of Hawthorne. Like all of McNaught’s male protagonists, Jordan was an asshole with a title. I kind of despised him for treating Alex so badly and such, and I’m glad that he got what he deserved when he came back from the dead. But one thing I hated about him was that he jumped the wrong conclusions so quickly and wouldn’t hear of the correct explanation. Ugh. Like when he thought she was trying to have him murdered – I understand what he thought, but couldn’t he have faith in his wife?
Among all of these negative things, I did enjoy the book, there were some things which had me smiling along and some scenes which I just thought were cute. Overall though, I’d give the book a:
