'Wild Irish Heart' by Tricia O'Malley

★★★

Could've Been Better

As it is currently, this is a simple story; one you could read easily without having to think hard to understand what is going on. 

The writer tries to give it more pizazz by adding additional elements to it to make it more than 'boy-meets-girl' type story and doesn't do too bad, but it still doesn't push the plot, characters and emotional connection past 3-stars. 

​​The main issues I had were the dialogue, contradictions throughout and predictability.
     1. The dialogue is not realistic and definitely over the top, especially when Keelin is speaking to her mother, in most cases downright disrespectful, which I did not appreciate.
       2. The writer also had multiple areas that were contradictory as well in her writing, that were irritating to read. Here are a few examples, there are quite a few more things like this:
             a. Keelin was set up with a guy by someone else, then that individual said I hope you aren’t still with that guy, I never thought he was good for you!
            b. Keelin says she is bitter towards another individual because this person never told her something she thought was important, yet she knows about it just not the fine details, but then claims that she and this individual have a close bond – not possible!
            c. Another character behaves as if they don’t like someone in every scene they meet this individual, but then says they don’t believe this person would have acted in such a manner, that they liked that person! 
         d. A character called someone they work with an ‘ugly old bat/hag’ or something along those lines, but based on the description of this character and how amazing they supposedly are and behaved previously, this comment is severely out of character.
    3. The writer also harps on anything Irish. If it isn’t one character constantly saying something is ‘too Irish’ or constantly mentioning things being Irish throughout the book, it gets very tiresome. We get it. And just because you are in Ireland, it doesn’t mean that the sheets are from Ireland without looking at the tag! I lived in Japan for 4 years and saw more things labeled from China, New Zealand and Australia than Japan. This is how irritating the constant mention of ‘Irish’ was throughout the story, with only a couple areas that were done correctly.
     4. Sadly, this book is predictable as well, I knew everything that occurred and exactly how even pertinent scenes would play out, 2 of which weren’t even remotely plausible. Now, depending on the genre, some aspects will be predictable, but nothing should be predictable on this level:
             a. The first is when Keelin has to help in a situation and she somehow knows how to deal with it even though she has absolutely no knowledge, while the person with more experience is unable to at all?
             b. The other was when a character gets extremely hurt. If you know anything about the human body, this particular injury is very difficult to achieve and the manner in which this individual supposedly got hurt would never have created such a dire injury.
             c. I was also able to guess who book 2 was going to be about, simply based on one scene and the unrealistic response of a particular character!

The saving grace of this book were the writing mechanics, the plot and emotional response. The plot is nothing spectacular, but it did continue moving along at a good pace and certainly wasn’t horrible. Other than weird punctuation to try and depict the dialogue, I didn’t really see anything wrong on that front. Though I couldn’t connect to any of the characters, the author did manage to make me want to slap and/or strangle the main character and her ‘woe is me’ mentality, but by the end the character actually made me smile, once. It’s a book that I could pick up again to read, if at the very minimum the dialogue and the contradictory aspects were fixed.