Welcome To New York by Luana Ferraz

As much as I usually enjoy this particular genre of story I became bogged down in this one and found it quite hard to finish. When Harry and Alana meet at the Green Leaf coffee shop it is your standard rom-com meet cute; nothing wrong with that it is a tried and tested device in both films and novels for a reason. It also allows us to explore why both characters are so determined to keep everybody else out of their business and what secrets they're hiding. So far so good.

Unfortunately, they couple up incredibly quickly and a good two thirds of the book are spent after they get together. Whilst this is not territory usually explored by the genre - we usually leave our protagonists after they admit their love for each other - I was willing to give it a go. The problem is that both characters are hiding things from the other and by the time they had visited Alana's family for the Holidays I found I was really not that interested in either character; they were simply words on the page and just not fully fleshed enough. I can't even remember if it was Thanksgiving or Christmas they went for, that's how bored I'd gotten of it by this point.

I also found the side stories of Harry wanting to set up a Tea Shop and Alana wanting to break on to Broadway very loose. All the time spent with both character's speculating on their future just felt like empty space.

None of which was helped by the fact I never actually felt like I was in New York or even in Oxford, there is no sense of place and really the story could have happened anywhere. Bit of a problem when the title leans so heavily on the location. It just felt like the author was writing about places she had no experience of and used a little bit of online searching to get a generalised touristic overview of the locales she wanted to use.

One of my biggest issues with this book was the language used within it's pages. I note the author is Brazilian and appreciate that English is, at best, her second language and that the book has not been translated from Portugese to English but written in English by the author herself. For this she is to be commended as I certainly could not hope to write even the most of sentences in anything but my mother tongue. However, it does lead to some interesting to some interesting word choices - commemoration instead of celebration. Unfortunately, the word "in" is consistently used in place of "on" and it such a glaring error that it began to take over the book for me. This really spoilt the book for me as it meant that I was constantly being jolted out of the story by grammatical mistakes and also by having to figure out what word was actually meant to be used. The book would have maybe, only maybe, received one more star from me had it been proof read by a native English speaker who could have corrected these mistakes.

Oh and giving Harry's brother William (explained by their mother being somewhat of a Royalist so I could let that one slide) a wife called Kate. Honestly?!?

THIS IS AN HONEST AND UNBIASED REVIEW OF A FREE COPY OF THE BOOK RECEIVED VIA BOOK SIRENS.