Hating Valentine's Day

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY 31. JAN. 2005

Rushby channels A Christmas Carol into this Valentine's Day tale about one Liv Hetherington, a single wedding photographer whose distaste for February's signature holiday prompts a spectral intervention-of the Dickensian kind. Though her father, her roommate and her boss all disapprove of Liv's no-time-for-dating lifestyle, this Valentine's Day our heroine is determined to lay low-that is, until she's visited by the Marley-esque ghost of a deceased co-worker. (A true horror for single women, Rushby's ethereal guide is an old lady who devotes all her affection to cats.) Thereafter, Liv greets a trio of ghostly visitors with little skepticism as they show her Valentine's Days past, present and future. Because Rushby narrates the novel from Liv's point of view, she often repeats the salient plot points several times: that Liv was abandoned by her ex-boyfriend, that she's living in dreams of the past, that her new suitor is genuinely a nice guy. The book's humor is similarly over-explained. When Cupid calls a woman's skirt "materially challenged," Liv repeats his observation a few sentences later: "her skirt's not quite as long as it could be." It's as if the author doesn't trust her readers to get her jokes or her narrative arguments. (She also hammers home the Dickens connection with frequent, heavy-handed references to the tale.) The repetitions drag down the book's momentum and smother much of its humor, dulling what might have otherwise been a clever remake of a classic tale of transformation and self-discovery.