Can’t Fight Fate book review

The main character Nikki went to psychic years ago. Now she lives in LA from Australia and every guy she dates she believes he could be the one the psychic mentioned a two-initialed green-eyed man that she cannot pursue, he must find and follow her.

There is little dialogue; there are a lot of sentences in her head. We are in Nikki’s head for the most part, and it’s very choppy. Not much action, it’s just her jumping-around thoughts that read like a young kid on too much coffee. This kind of prose might sound fun while writing it, but the audience doesn’t need to know every thought. They want action and dialogue. They want how the character feels and acts, not just a huge stream of consciousness. There was much back and forth between then and now, and sometimes confusing to what was present day. The antics in which she ‘gets herself into!” are a bit contrived, and a lot of Nikki makes me want to say, girl, chill out with some wine and relax.

This book feels like a high school girl’s rambling diary- many exclamation points!!! Many ‘sigh, what should I do?! I just want love!!!!’
These laments and much of the grammar and punctuation makes me wonder who edited this.

I like and get the idea of trying to fit your life into something you’d like to think is pre-planned. Horoscopes and psychics-who doesn’t try to fit our lives into nice little boxes that a daily horoscope tells us? Unless you get very specific with a psychic, it’s easy to think every moment in your life is THE ONE that the psychic mentioned during a reading. Nikki and her best friend Sioban navigate life in LA, but not much is spend on what it’s like to be an Aussie transplant living on the Coast. I’d like to see definitive actions and less of what’s in her head, because I’m not connecting with her and not really caring if she falls in love or not. More on fate and psychics would be great in the rest of the trilogy, because the potential to be great is here.

The author is trying to get people to see that fate is out there and you can’t fight it, but trying to navigate through Nikki’s constant babble is distracting and arduous. Who’s to say this green-eyed man that is for HER exists? Does he wear contacts?? (I kid) I feel a bit sorry for her too- waiting, hoping, and praying what someone told her is her solid future. Also, at the end, her best friend announces she just found out she’s pregnant, and that it’s a boy. I’m pretty sure you can’t tell the baby’s gender until at least 16 weeks..not the first month.

And the end just stops. She leaves us to read the next book to see what happens, but there’s no closure. There’s no, is this the one, or yes, is CJ it? Does she decide to be single or go for it? Laying the groundwork for the next two books just seems excessive. What’s next for Nikki? She IS fighting fate pretty hard here, because what she was told is probably not who she will fall in love and ultimately end up with. Do we even care?

* A copy of the book was sent to me for review purposes.