Book Review: Better Than Fiction

Title: Better than Fiction

Author: April W. Gardner and Michelle Massaro

Date: 2016

ISBN: 978-0-9973797-1-6

Publisher: Plaited Press

Quote: "I tell ya, the Johnson project is killing me."

This Christian romance is "different": It's a collaboration in which one author supplied a sweet historical romance for the other author's contemporary character to be writing while she deals with her own love story. Neither story will embarrass readers if the children see it. Well, not much.

Meghan is a young mother working hard on a novel. Steve, her husband, doesn't seem to respond to her kisses even when she breaks out the slinky black nightie while the children are at Grandma's house. He spends a lot of time away from home. He even mumbles something about a basketball game with a neighbor, Paul, whose wife then blurts out that Paul hasn't seen Steve lately. Meghan is spending a lot of time with her friend Brooke at the gym, where the trainer, Curtis, seems to appreciate Meghan.

In Meghan's novel, it's 1916 and early motor racer Russell takes his Bearcat into a garage where he's been referred to Fred the mechanic. Fred is Winifred, a girl defying conventions to keep her father's shop open while her brother is off wasting his substance in riotous living. Winifred does not really approve of racing, since it's how her father died, but she needs the money and likes Russell so she ends up riding with him, as early "mechanicians" did, during the big race. 

Should Meghan trust her husband and ignore the lust in her heart? Can Winifred and Russell win enough money to pay off Winifred's brother's debts? The romance genre does not leave much doubt about the eventual outcome, these days, although the existence of a tragic romance subgenre used to raise a real question whether characters would be united at the altar or in the sweet by-and-by. People read to find out whether the author's way of resolving the lovers' doubts and quarrels, nowadays, and it's a pleasure to write that these authors' ways are reasonably plausible. 

Meghan's story is overtly Christian, with emotional crises resolved in prayer. Winifred's makes less reference to religion, but we know Meghan's characters aren't likely to be non-Christians. If you like reading about Christians in love, this twofer novel is for you.

(It's December already. Will Book Funnel writers overload my e-readers with Christmas stories again this year? This is a California story, complete with an afterword steering readers through a tour of the town of Corona. I'm not guaranteeing that there will or will not be a month of Christmas stories, but there will be some of those this month.)