Shadows of the Past by Carmen Stefanescu

Title: Shadows of the Past
Author: Carmen Stefanescu
Publisher: Wild Child Publishing
Date Published: December 4, 2012

Goodreads Summary

When Anne and Neil leave on a one-week holiday hoping to reconcile after a two-year separation, little do they know that destiny has other plans for them. Their discovery of human bones and a bejeweled cross in the hollow of a tree open the door to the supernatural realm and the anguished life of Genevieve, a nun from medieval England.

Can Anne save her relationship and help Genevieve her eternal rest?

The twists and turns in this paranormal tale keep the reader guessing up to the end and weave themselves together into a quest to rekindle love.

“Shed blood never dies, they say. It cried for the settling of things.”

This book wasn’t for me. I had quite a few problems with this one. Ms. Carmen approached me with this book, asking if I would review it, I checked out the trailer and the synopsis and it sounded really interesting. Plus that title. It wasn’t the type of stuff I usually read but never the less I decided to try it because it sounded good.

I think the main problem with the book was the writing style. Because of it I couldn’t connect to the characters. The whole plot line was amazing and I liked how the past and the future didn’t exactly overlap each other. They were very alike but they weren’t the exact same thing.

The thing with the writing style was that it was too wordy, like dumping words from a dictionary or thesaurus. For example the sentence “My curiosity’s aroused”. The author could have said the same thing using different words that would help the reader connect to the book more.

One of my other problems was the characters. They were too pants (if you don’t know what I mean, go to http://theoatmeal.com/story/twilight ). There wasn’t much about their personalities. I mean, we know how they look like, what jobs they do, the reason Neil and Anne broke up, but that’s about it. We don’t know what they like or anything.

Some of the more annoying things were that the story line that takes place in the past didn’t seem like it was taking place in the 15^th century. There is a certain way people act that helps you know what century they were in. It was like there were the rituals/traditions/etiquettes of that century but it didn’t seem like they were in that century. You could tell from the way to talk.

The way Neil and Anne talked in the present was similar so it sounded really weird because that’s not how people talked even in 1990’s, I am sure of it. Plus the whole nickname thing, it doesn’t make sense that the same nickname would be used in the 15^th century and in the 20^th century. That’s too coincidental. When you think about the 15^th century was still middle English so they wouldn’t use a nickname like “My beautiful wood anemone”.

I also disliked the fact that the whole story was centered around love, I love romances but to have a story centered around love, it didn’t work for me.

I think one of the better parts was the ending, it left us on the note that it wasn’t completely an HEA, shit would still happen but you got the feeling that they would get through with it.