Jen read and liked Sandy's review of The Spare :

"I searched out this book because I loved Jewel's recent release, Scandal, but wow. Let's just say her plotting has much improved since she wrote The Spare. I really wanted to love it, but it was so. damn. boring. I ended up skimming much of the book....more I searched out this book because I loved Jewel's recent release, Scandal, but wow. Let's just say her plotting has much improved since she wrote The Spare. I really wanted to love it, but it was so. damn. boring. I ended up skimming much of the book.

Here are my problems with it:

1. Too realistic, and by that I mean the author spent way too much time on events that were dull, as I'm sure they might have been in real life. When one of the servants mentioned he would take Pennhyll's guests on a tour of the castle, I groaned because I knew I didn't give one chit about the castle.

2. The dialogue. God, it was boring. It filled page after page and did not engage me at all.

3. Sebastian. Liked him in the first chapter, but then I really started to dislike him. For half the book, he believes his brother beat and raped Olivia, but he's imagining himself with her. He's barely able to control himself and, in his dreams (see #4) he's very forceful with her. I found this dispicable.

4. The ghost thing. Sebastian and Olivia kept seeing the "Black Earl" and dreaming about being with each other. There were times when I thought they might actually be together, but it turned out they'd imagined the encounter. Granted, I skimmed a lot of this book, but I think I would have been confused even if I read every word.

5. Sebastian and Olivia are idiots. The moment Hew Willow showed up on the scene, it was SO FREAKING OBVIOUS he was the bad guy. It took Olivia having sex with Sebastian to suddenly restore her memory.

6. The ending. So, Sebastian now knows Hew is the man who killed his brother, his brother's wife, and almost Olivia. Sebastian calmly walks into the party going on downstairs and asks to talk to him. Then, we get several long, boring explanations of what happened. THEN, Hew kills himself. Off-camera, I might add. No action at all. Very anti-climatic.

7. The characters. No matter how many times Sebastian imagined his hands entangled in Olivia's red hair, I just didn't feel the spark between these two people. I didn't care so much that, when it came to them finally "making love", I skipped the scene just so I could be done with the book.

So, yeah, I didn't like Carolyn Jewel's The Spare. Perhaps she's just now coming into her best writing. The Scandal was a great read and I recommend it, but don't bother hunting down this out-of-print book.(less) "