Promise Me (original 2010; edition 2010)

This book was beyond awful. I had heard so much about Richard Paul Evans and I was very excited to finally get my hands on one of his books... suffice it to say this will be the first and last book I ever pick up of his. I went into this expecting some type of Nicholas Sparks storyline... this pile of junk was ... not. This book was like a train wreck, yet I kept reading thinking, 'This HAS to get better' but noooo... it just continued to get worse. I hated myself for finishing this. And the ending? It was borderline offensive. I wouldn't recommend this book to a single person. ( )

Great book - read it in 2 days! Interesting ideas and concepts. I would have liked to have seen Beth have a list for Matthew at the end - that felt kind of unresolved to me. ( )

I LOVED this novel! I could not put it down and literally read it in one sitting in two hours!! The characters draw you close and you feel like you are a part of the story; love story that is. I smiled so much that I cried! Definitely a must read for Evans fans! ( )

What is it with these Christmas books? No matter how much alike they are, no matter how predictable, you can’t get through them without crying.

This one is about a young woman, Beth, who was not having a good life. It was 1989. Beth discovered her husband was cheating. A lot. Nevertheless, she decided she still loved him and would forgive him, only to find out he was dying of pancreatic cancer. He died in October. Meanwhile, her daughter Charlotte developed a mysterious disease no one could diagnose. Between the medical bills for her husband and daughter, Beth could no longer afford payments on her house. Then on Christmas Day, during a quick trip to the neighborhood 7-Eleven, she met a handsome stranger, Matthew, who changed her life forever.

However, when we first meet Beth in a prologue, it’s Christmas Eve, 2008, and she is married to Kevin.

The desire to find out what happened in the intervening years keeps you reading to the end, when we come back full-circle to the beginning.

Discussion: This book is of the "holiday book" genre in which you expect certain tropes, like magic or angels, and in which you do not expect to find multisyllabic words or high-flown prose. Even accepting the parameters of the genre, however, the author seems to have forgotten some important parts of the plot set-up. Thus, in spite of the appealing aspects of his main conceit, there are crater-sized holes in the logic that the author just elides over at the end. However, this didn’t stop me from crying. Christmas books, Christmas movies, Christmas commercials – doesn’t matter: they turn me into a eye-leaking mess.

Evaluation: A readable Christmas book with a fun twist, albeit with a couple of gapingly large plot holes. ( )

The first and only book of RPE that I have not given 5 stars. While I did enjoy this book and found it hard to put down, I'm really not into the whole he dates his future mother-in-law thing. I get that he saved her and changed her future and his wife's for the better, but it's still kind of creepy. With the strong Christian theme's of RPE books I am surprised by this turn. While the overall message was good and it was written in the same addicting manner, I'm not completely in love with it. ( )