A Bird Without Wings by Roberta Pearce - a review

A Bird Without Wings by Roberta Pearce

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


A Bird Without Wings by Roberta Pearce was my first-ever romance read. Hmm . . . no need to run for the hills, I'm not about to turn all romantic on you. Nevertheless, I read quite a few very intelligent comments by Ms. Pearce on Goodreads, and wanted to find out whether that intelligent writing can also be found in her novels. So, I bought a copy and started to read.

There is no doubt that Ms. Pearce can write, and write well. While I kept shaking my head in disagreement with the subject matter and the genre-typical choice of words, the writing more than made up for the head shaking. Expecting to sample a few pages and move on to something else, I'll admit that I was pulled into the story and read the entire book. That's how good the writing was.

The novel made me laugh, it made me care, and it made me interested in the final outcome. No, not whether the gal gets the guy--it's genre, so there has to be a happily-ever-after--but Ms. Pearce is quite apt at writing a story within a story, and that secondary plot kept me curious until the end. It was a mystery of sorts, well-developed and full of twists and turns, and it involved some hideous family heirloom art kept around for the sake of tradition. Quite clever, actually, and (to me) much more entertaining than the gal/guy thing.

The mystery aside, the book is full of wonderfully crafted characters I loved to hate and hated to love. The two main protagonists, Callie and Lucious (or Luscious, as Callie sometimes calls him) have everything a character needs and then some. They are both complete, backstory and all, which fits perfectly with their current behavior. A secondary cast of characters, also fully developed, plays some minor and some major roles along the way, adding to the realistic quality of the plot.

Since my usual reads are vastly different from this book, I would have liked to see certain traits and backgrounds take the front stage, but then this book would have been a psychological study of a damaging childhood rather than a romance novel, which was not Ms. Pearce's intention. Thus, my rating is mainly based on the quality of the writing, the character development, and how invested I became in the story.

Chances are, I will not read another romance novel any time soon, but I'm glad I read this one.




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