For Better, For Worse, Forever

The book For Better, For Worse, Forever is just another addition to a long list of teen romance novelettes by the Louis L'Amour of the genre, Lurlene McDaniel. It tells the story of April Lancaster, a beautiful redhead (just look at the book's cover) one year out of high school and vacationing with her parents in the tropical setting of St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands. She wants to love an island local she meets, friendly but complicated Brandon Benedict, but can't shake her loyalty towards her dead fiance, Mark, himself a victim of car crash injuries complicated by an infliction of cystic fibrosis. If all this is beginning to sound a little heady, then get this: Impossibly beautiful April is secretly dying of a brain tumor, to boot! show more McDaniel knocks readers off their perch with these facts that get in the way of an otherwise enjoyable little travelogue about a nice guy showing a pretty girl around a tropical island getaway. The story is injected with a much needed grounding by the account of the suicidal death of Brandon's mother and the wedge it drives between he and his father. Other than that, the steady progression towards a maudlin ending kills off any sense of rationality on why one would begin to read the book in the first place. Strictly for the soap opera crowd. The use of the book in a high school library could be by English teachers instructing by example the conventions and plot elements of a typical sub-genre of the romance novel of the 20th/21st century. show less