This book is weird.
Here are some examples of things that are said and done in this book:
**"In the uncomfortable backseat of Merton's car, Honey had sex for the first time....she did not particularly enjoy it, but that was not important. The important thing was that Merton enjoyed it.....So this is how I please a man, Honey thought."
Honey makes me want to bang my head against a wall. There can't possibly be girls like her in the world, right? I need there to not be girls like that in the world. Or at the very least this needs to have been a 90s thing.
**At one point there is a line about a doctor, nicknamed 007, who the book says "[takes] out organs that were healthy." In what world would NO ONE in a hospital do anything about this?! But wait! It gets worse! Another resident actually says to Paige, when she brings this up, "Calm down. I'll take you out and buy you lunch."
I mean, REALLY?!
**The girls get the bright idea to throw a party to cheer themselves up. Except they throw said party AT THE HOSPITAL. And then when everyone gets paged and has to go back to saving lives, (y'know, that thing they do IN A HOSPITAL) one of them actually says, "I can't believe what's happening."
CAN'T YOU?
**Kat introduces herself as follows:
"I'm Kate Hunter. They call me Kat."
Kate and Kat are BOTH short forms of Katherine. If you prefer Kat, why are you introducing yourself as Kate?!
**There is a typo on the first page. Seriously.
**Honey says that she has bad luck with men, and Kat says that maybe she'll have better luck at the hospital. Because when you're a woman just starting your career in a male dominated field, you would absolutely think this way.
And there's more:
Paige finds out that she's going to be working with a world-renowned doctor, whom she has never met, nor even seen a picture of, and before she even meets him she HAS A SEX DREAM ABOUT HIM.
REALLY?! It was at this point I started to think this book had to be a joke. Like maybe somebody swapped out the real copy for this ridiculousness. Because this book has gotten good reviews and I honestly don't understand why.
**There are SO MANY things wrong with the chapter where Jason and Paige meet. First of all, he calls the hospital and asks for her home number, and a secretary JUST GIVES IT TO HIM, without even asking WHY he wants it. Oh, and when he shows up for their first date, she's asleep in the on call room. A nurse tells him where she is, instead of calling her, and then he goes in and just WATCHES HER SLEEP. It's creepy. And apparently at this point he already thinks he's going to marry her.
For their second date, he takes her to MEET HIS PARENTS. Their SECOND date! Guys, this is so. creepy.
Oh, and on said date, she falls asleep at the dinner table. Like, head falls straight down on the table. In front of his parents. While there is food on the table.
I mean, COME ON.
**At one point there's a patient who it turns out has cholera, and the administrator decides to cover it up because it would hurt the hospital, and we're supposed to believe that EVERYONE is totally fine to go along with this.
REALLY?!
**The part where Paige euthanizes the patient she winds up on trial for murdering is weird. She takes all of three seconds to agree to do it. And then she does it right away. No second guessing. No discussing it with her colleagues or Kat and Honey. And it says that the patient only had a few days to live. I'm pro-DAS, but even I thought that if he's only got a few days left, why do it? It would obviously lead to some problems for her, so why bring all of that trouble down on herself over the difference of a few days?
**Paige doesn't know that her boyfriend and future husband has married someone else until he shows up on her doorstep with his new wife.
SERIOUSLY?!
So yeah. This book is weird. A lot of the lines and situations just seem so ridiculous, like they'd never happen.
The author wrote for television before he started writing novels, and it shows. The book reads like a script. It's mostly just dialogue and the scenes move very quickly. It jumps between scenes and characters in a really odd way. Kind of like you'd see on TV. The lack of descriptive passages isn't entirely a negative, because I generally find descriptive passages to be boring, and making it dialogue-heavy makes the book a quick read, but at the very least I would expect a portion of the book to be dedicated to what was going on in a character's head in between the dialogue.
Mostly I was just disappointed that the author couldn't shift from the one medium to the other. In fact, the epilogue reads EXACTLY like the end to a movie based on a true story, where they tell you what happened to each of the real-life people after the movie ends.
The thing that's a real shame is it actually starts to get good toward the end. It stays on one narrative - none of that weird jumping between brief scenes that have nothing to do with each other - and the story actually becomes interesting. But then the book is over, so....
Basically, this guy should have stuck to TV.