Sara's Reviews > Forget Me Knot

Maybe 2.5 stars. While this book qualifies as chick-lit, making you know from the start how the story will, in general, play out, it could still have been fun. However, there are too many filler scenes, superfluous backstories, and stereotyped characters for it to be very great.

Abby owns a flower shop, conquers her fear of elevators one day to get in one while running late, only to have it malfunction and keep her stuck in it for a long time with a strange man. She ends up telling the man all sorts of secrets (a la Sophie Kinsella's Can You Keep a Secret?), then later discovers that the man is a movie director interested in using her shop as a backdrop. The plot itself sounds cute, but then there are so many little subplots that are nothing but filler plots: Abby's parents are on a cruise that's not going well, Abby's gay coworker is having a spat with his ex-boyfriend about custody of their dog, Abby's best friend is nervous about taking her new half-black, half-Jewish boyfriend to meet her parents, etc.

One of the worst things about this book is that the characters were not very fleshed out. Everyone and everything were very shallow and superficial, despite the author going into a long-winded explanation of everyone's histories whenever they were introduced. Long descriptions do not make people suddenly three-dimensional. There are pages of conversation meant to fill the reader in on the events of people's lives and there are long, unnecessary diatribes about, for example, the history Abby has with her boyfriend's friends.

This book was in need of some serious reworking. If the characters had been deeper and a lot of the subplots had been cut, it could have been better (not perfect or even great, but better). Unfortunately, there were SO many cliches used in the story and so many of the characters relied on stereotypical behavior from someone of their background (ie, the nosy Jewish girl, the pompous rich guy, the gay best friend, cute pet names for everyone...) that I didn't feel like I was reading about real people but about caricatures. Everything wrapped up extremely neatly (not a bad thing, but it was almost too neat) and the final "twist" in the love story near the end of the book was just eye-rollingly dumb, like it was trying to prolong the life of this book that had enough plot to fill maybe 50 pages yet used almost 400.

The cover is cute, but it stops there. There are much better books out there and much better chick lit.