A Personal Matter

Rating:
Summary: Angry Black Woman...Why?
Review: A Personal Matter by Karyn Langhorne wasn't the greatest thing I've ever read. While I loved Ben "Iceman" Richards, I just didn't care for Alayna. I don't/didn't understand how she could let her sister,Martine,just run over her time and again. I never understood why the auther made Alayna so angry with white people and she never set about to explain or give any general cause. I found Alayna to be the infuriating one while Ice did his best to show how much he cared for Alayna and all she did was regect him time and again. I know if someone gave me a diamond ring,I wouldn't give it back to him,not if I really loved him the way Alayna claimed to love Ice. I understand how she didn't want to give up her new found freedom but sometimes you gotta sacrifice for the ones you love.

The book was relatively good but I just wish the author would've gave Ali more emotions or something. I understand that Alayna was a strong,African-American woman but she didn't have to constantly pound it into our heads every other page. I found Jamal to be a great character and quite mature. He wanted to do the right thing by Martine and the baby. I found Martine to be totally ungrateful and didn't appreciate Alayna and she should've told Jamal the truth. Ice was just incredible,I liked him from the minute he first appeared in the book. He was definitely a man I could have great debates with no matter how infuriating he is. I thought he was incredibly sweet to Alayna,from the way he called her Ali and took care of her while she recovered from her head injury and fatigue to their first time together. I just wish Ms.Langhorne could've made Alayna more of a woman with a soul.

Rating:
Summary: A pleasurable read
Review: Because I have been a legal secretary for several years, this book piqued my interest. I thought that the plot and story were well written and very realistic. There were two characters that I loved. . . one was Jamal and the other was Ben Richards. Jamal was a very mature, admirable 18 year old who was determined to hold his own. Ben was very strong willed and extremely confident and did not allow the "good 'ole boy" system dictate his life. The author touched on racism from both black and white perspectives. I also liked the chemistry that developed between Alayna and Ben and how their feelings for one another ascended color barriers.

I would recommend this book.

Rating:
Summary: an okay book
Review: First, let me say that this book was unbelievably well written and the dialogue was awesome. It made the pages fly and really moved this book along. Also, this story had the potential to be great and I kept reading expecting greatness.

Now to the main problem I saw: both Alayna and Ben were not very likeable characters. She has a big chip on her shoulder and loads of attitude and we never really see a good reason for it. He behaves like a jerk through most of their initial contacts. I had no feeling that these two had atraction or feelings for each other until WHAM- at the end of the book, there they are in love. This was like a bad Harlequin Romance where the characters hate each other until the last chapter when they admit they fell in love. You are left wondering WHEN??? and WHY???

I am giving this book three stars because the legal stuff that they were doing at work held my attention and the secondary characters were interesting even if they did not further any of the story.



Rating:
Summary: Promising start
Review: I agree with the others reviewers that this book hooks you in right from the start. I especially love the initial relationship between Ben and Alayna, the adversarial current between them was exciting, but then the budding romance became implausible. I don't buy how Ben (Ice Man) starts falling for her so quickly. I also don't believe that Alayna, who clearly acted unprofessional in a top notch law firm that was predominately white, would get away with making frequent racist comments about her co-workers. Black people in general have to watch their backs in white corporate America. Let's get real, she's an underlining as a paralegal, I don't care how bright or how much potential she had, home girl was expendable.

I'm also tired of how black women are portrayed in these i/r romances like they have no sense or home training. It's like some of these characters are trying so hard to suppress their natural "ghetto" side to them. I feel the novel went stale about two-thirds in. And what was up with the love/sex scenes? I couldn't believe that Ben and Alayna were intimate, the bickering between them became old hat after a while. I'm wasn't looking for them to be lovely-dovey, they were abrasive people by nature, but the constant references of nagging and race commentary made me feel that there was nothing else between them but that. I was very disappointed by the end of the book but I still recommend it. For a first time writer, Langhorne did an excellent job and hope to see more work from her in the future.

Rating:
Summary: Just wonderful!
Review: I agree with the reviewer below about the GOOD points of this novel--great dialogue, polished writing style. As for the rest of the review ("Just Okay"), I wonder if we read the same book? The secondary characters are necessary to the storyline--whose life is not complicated by family?--and are well drawn. As for Alayna not changing--Huh?? Alayna's changing was the whole point. She changed, and then some. This book is must-read for anyone who enjoys a good story of substance. I am so pleased to see that Ms. Langhorne has a new book coming out this summer.

Rating:
Summary: Just okay
Review: I read this book because of the great reviews it received on this site. I thought it was an okay book but I didn't love it.

The Good:
Technically, this was a well written book. It has a polish and a sophistication that one does not normally find in an author's first book.

The dialogue was great. It was snappy and witty and I could actually "hear" the characters talking.

The not so Good:
I didn't care about the characters. Alayna was the most repressed, isolated character I have ever read about. I didn't like her and I didn't sympathize with her. Normally, this isn't such a bad thing as long as the character grows and changes during the course of the story. I don't feel that Alayna's character grew at all during the story. I think she was simply repositioned.

I actually liked Ben, but for a hotshot lawyer he didn't seem very hot-shot at all. The follow through of the character did not live up to the set up. Of all the characters I think he was the one with the most depth.

I thought the secondary characters dragged down the story. I appreciate secondary characters a lot in a story because they can really add texture, and a great supporting framework for the main characters. But the father storyline and the sister storyline were distracting. Maybe that is because the primary storyline of the romance between the two main characters just wasn't very engaging.

This takes me to my biggest disappointment. I didn't feel as if these two characters connected to each other at all. Alayna seemed so disdainful of Ben and white people in general that it seemed really bizarre that she would actually unbend enough to date a white guy let alone marry one. I think the author tried to so hard to showcase Alayna as a strong black woman that she forgot to show how even a strong black woman becomes vulnerable in love. Alayna never became vulnerable in my opinion. So much so, that I found myself wondering why did Ben even bother.

As I got toward the end of the book I kept expecting wondering how the heck they'd get it together and become a couple. Alas, it was a quick dénouement where everything happened all at once. I wish the book had a bit more depth and a lot more emotion.

Rating:
Summary: A Personal Matter
Review: I've read my share of I/R novels over the last year and a few were written by first time novelists and I can truly say without hesitation that I really enjoyed this one. The 2 main characters were equally interesting, strong, funny and were given a realistic backdrop to discover their feelings for each other in. In a nutshell, these charcters were 3-dimentional. Nothing far-fetched, annoying, irrational or aggravating here. Great job, Karyn Langhorne.

Rating:
Summary: This book was not all that
Review: Ok, I picked up this book and could not put it down. I like Karyn's style of writing, she keeps things interesting HOWEVER there were several points that annoyed the HELL out of me:

1. Why was Alayna constantly angry, bitter and tired? The idea of taking care of herself let alone any form of pampering herself was the most foreign concept to her.

2. Why the hell was her sister so out-of-control? Why didn't they seem to have any rapport or mutual respect? I don't know ANY woman that would allow herself to be so victimized by a teenager.

3. Why did Ben's love or affection for Alayna seem to come out of nowhere? We knew getting into this book that this would be the love interest. But the development or rather the lack of development of their feelings for one another was completely lacking. Just because they expressed concern for each other live's was hardly a proper set-up. This could have been intensely developed.

4. The love scenes were wack! The descriptions and the set-up for the sex was my biggest disappointment!! Karyn really needs to study some of her counterparts and really learn to connect her readers with these romantic and intimate moments. She did a horrible job on that one. Why did she wait until that very moment to announce Alayna's virginity. Poor timing. And then on top of that she made Alayna seem so sexually advanced after that when that is generally not the way losing your virginity goes.

I do think that as an author Karyn has a tremendous opportunity for growth and her next works will probably reflect her potential. One to watch.

Rating:
Summary: Long and Dry
Review: This has to be one of the biggest regrets in my lifetime...........................ordering this book online is the biggest mistake I've ever made. Silly me, I should have read the reviews for this book before I got excited just to use my new credit card.
I'm not going to even categorize this book in romance, this is just the worse novel I have ever read in my whole life.........PERIOD! This book is not a page turner at all, I think that the author forgot she was riding a romance novel, because there's so much blah-blah talking going on that it sucks the no romance this book already has out. This so-called romance novel is so horrible that I didnt even finsh the book, I just got about hundred pages from the end, until I put it down because I could not stand the constant bickering between Richards and Alayna, there relationship to me was so elementry, with the whole phony animosity towards each other attitude when they know deep down inside that they like each other, the constant argueing between the two sucks all the romance out the book. Another thing is the authors and Alayna's constant referral to Richards as "Ice", that is very irritating, okay WE the readers get the point, he's as cold as Ice, how many times do you have to metion it.................Its hard to feel any kind of connection towards a character when the only thing that is said about him/her is negative, and I felt that alot towards Ice......I mean Richards. I could not find a character that I liked in this book, Alayna to me was just so friggin' rude..............it's like when it comes to her wild little sister Martine, she becomes so soft, but when shes dealing with other charcters in the book, all of a sudden she's aggressive, which I find very annoying, I mean if you are going to switch up personality's on your characters', do it efficiently. When I stopped reading this book, I just decided to skim to the end of the book and look for a juicy love scene, that I could not even do, because there's alot of blah-blah-ing and argueing going, I just put this book down in aggravation.
Another thing in this book was the huuuuuuuuuge typo it had, where at one part the R&B singer Alicia Keys is reffered to as Alishia Keyes?
If you are going to buy this book, your wasting your money, just take it out the library or try to forget it exists.
A long and dry read!

Rating:
Summary: Not good, not good at all...
Review: Where do I start? Ok, I must say that this book had potential to shine - but it failed miserably. Our main characters Alayna and Ben were not in the least interesting at all. Alayna had a chip on her shoulder the size of a redwood and backed it up with behaviour just as overwhelming. Ben on the other hand, seemed to be a one dimensional schizo whose only redeeming factor was the fact that he cared for his father. Let's break it down...

We have Alayna, whose mistrust of "the man" has her coming across more racist than "strong". She has a bad attitude overall and loves to jump to conclusions at every drop of a hat. She also has a rude penchant for waving her hands in people's faces and letting them know what's what. Major turn off there.

Ben comes off like a crazy man - I didn't really understand him and his "secret" that was driving him to behave so STUPID and irrational 99% of the time. When you discover the "secret" he was keeping you're like "so what!" it was nothing worthy of his tantrums and split personality that we see throughout the book. But for all his brass, he didn't say anything when his boss wanted to nip his interracial romance in the bud... he couldn't even meet the man's eyes afterwards.

Martine, Alayna's sister is one rude, ungrateful, headstrong, deceitful totally unlikeable character. She has no redeming qualities about her and really did not contribute anything to the story - she didn't really accomplish her role as a catalyst and quite frankly whenever she appeared I had to grit my teeth to read on. I didn't understand her unwarranted aggression - there was no need to draw her like this. I would have cut her loose the first chance I got.

The other minor character - was his name Linc? He was totally useless - why did Alayna even try to go out with him since she could see the kind of person he was... he could have been drawn better than he was - he was there simply to tell Alayna she should try to get with a "brother" instead of a white man *yawn* that's one tired line.

The other characters were just as one sided and only made the book worse in my opinion.

Personally, I do not see how they actually became a couple - I didnt see a transition to that level of their relationship (if that's what you want to call it) - it was like one minute they dislike each other, are wary of each other and generally not "meshing" per se and the next they are in bed... oh and that whole white=funky smelling thing is OLD! And the whole situation of her being told she should choose a black man instead of a white one is just as old! Additionally, some of the wording was confusing - I had to guess what the author meant and sometimes it seemed as though she lost her train of thought and some parts of the story drifted off into nowhere, while at other times the characters seemed to be one place in one line and then another place in the second line! I had to look and see if I had missed a page on a few occasions!

In summary - read this if you are desperate and have read all your other books (including the dictionary) - but remember to buy it second hand.