Book Review: A Billion Reasons Why

A Billion Reasons Why, by Kristin Billerbeck, tells the story of Katie McKenna, a New Orleans native who fled her hometown, after embarrassing herself in front of her boyfriend, Luc DeForges, his family and friends.  We meet Kate eight years later.  She believes she has moved on from her past, she lives a very practical life, and is engaged to very practical Dexter Hastings.  She almost has herself convinced that this is what she needs to be happy when Luc reenters, and flies her home to face the past, and question her future.  Can true love prevail, over practicality?

I became a fan of Kristin Billerbeck when I read her Ashley Stockingdale Series, and was happy to read another book by her.  That is said, because I really wanted to like this book.  It is your typical fluff book, to read for fun.  It is filled with likable characters, and a basic story line we can all relate to, returning home to face our past.

For all the positives found in this book, I also found it frustrating to read.  From the beginning I felt like I had jumped into the middle of a story.  As if this book was from a series, and this one was the second book in the series.  There were gaps in the story and weakly developed characters.

True, by the end of the book, all questions were answered, and the characters had a little more depth, but all this shouldn't have happened the last two chapters in the book.  True, there needs to be a climax to the story.  However, I spent most of the book wondering how this situation came about, or why they were saying such things about that character.  There was no initial development to make any sense of the developing conclusions.  As most romantic fiction, the story line was rather far fetched, but that can be forgiven because it is fiction, anything can happen.  However, the lack of detail and fully defined characters made the romantic story line a little harder to accept.

I'm not saying not to read it.  If you enjoy Kristin Billerbeck, and/or Christian fiction, go for it.  However, I can't give it a total approval either.  So take this as, reader beware.  Hopefully, you will enjoy it more then I did.