Someone Else's Love Story by Joshilyn Jackson

At twenty-one, Shandi Pierce is juggling finishing college, raising her delightful three-year-old genius son Natty, and keeping the peace between her eternally warring, long-divorced Catholic mother and Jewish father. She’s got enough complications without getting caught in the middle of a stick-up in a gas station mini-mart and falling in love with a great wall of a man named William Ashe, who willingly steps between the armed robber and her son.

Shandi doesn’t know that her blond god Thor has his own complications. When he looked down the barrel of that gun he believed it was destiny: It’s been one year to the day since a tragic act of physics shattered his universe. But William doesn’t define destiny the way other people do. A brilliant geneticist who believes in science and numbers, destiny to him is about choice.

Now, he and Shandi are about to meet their so-called destinies head on, in a funny, charming, and poignant novel about science and miracles, secrets and truths, faith and forgiveness,; about a virgin birth, a sacrifice, and a resurrection; about falling in love, and learning that things aren’t always what they seem—or what we hope they will be. It’s a novel about discovering what we want and ultimately finding what we need.

I didn’t really understand what this book was trying to be. Although it does have romantic elements, the story is too strange to really be considered a romance. I think that the author tried to do too many things, mixing too many genres at once.

It’s hard to create a believable love story with a character like William, one of the protagonists. He is supposed to have Asperger’s syndrome, but it is not a well developed aspect of his character. He was a very “blah” character. Even when we were in his head, I was bored. It would have been much more interesting to have been in the other male protagonist’s mind, Walcott’s. Instead we jump from Shandi, who is another dull headspace, to William’s.

The plot starts off strong, with the big, robbery scene right at the beginning, but doesn’t manage to  keep that kind of pace. There is too much pining and whining throughout the rest of the novel to truly be interesting.

I am sure there are better romance novels out there.