Act Two by Kimberly Stuart

Act Two by Kimberly Stuart
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is the story of Sadie Maddox, a classical vocalist who is seeing her CD sales and concert attendance fall as her age rises. Her agent suggests that she pads her bank account by taking a guest professorship in a college music department. However, this means she has to leave her beloved NYC to move to rural Iowa. Will she be able to make the adjustment?

I enjoyed the heroine's biting inner monologue; Kimberly Stuart really brought Sadie to life and I could clearly hear her voice in my head. Having been trained by many years of romantic comedy viewing, to me Sadie sounded exactly like a spoiled diva who would think of Iowa dismissively as a flyover state. She likes shopping and good restaurants and turns her nose up at anything that she views as lowbrow. Yet she rarely says anything harsh out loud, which I appreciated.

However, 24 hours after I finished the book, I found that I wished there had been a little bit more of everything else. I put this on my women's fiction shelf mainly because there wasn't enough of the other elements to classify it differently, in my opinion. Sadie didn't spend enough time with her love interest to call it a romance. There weren't enough scenes of Sadie with her students for it to be a good school story. Sadie didn't show enough growth for it to be a Christian redemption or even a secular redemption story. If any one of those avenues had been pursued a little further, it would have elevated this book. So women's fiction it is for me, by default.

With all that said, I still enjoyed Stuart's writing enough to seek out another one of her books. It definitely passes the "auntie test"; it is not heavily Christian but it is clean. This was a pleasant diversion, even if I felt that nothing much had changed with Sadie in the end.

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