For Once in My Life

by Colleen Coleman

Image courtesy of Fantasticfiction.com.

Coleman attempts to force Lily Buckley, a sweet but underdeveloped character, out of her comfort zone for the good of the reader—but Lily won’t budge.

As the accidental editor of a failing, small-town newspaper, Lily’s charged with increasing readership by 22 percent in four weeks (a superhuman feat I, a journalist, don’t begin to believe). When her publisher orders her to establish a weekly feature titled “Buckley Bucket List” to start reaching the Gazette’s under-served demographic, Lily attempts four “items” and writes about them each week to generate readership. She builds her list with Christopher, a big-city consultant who promises not to make Lily do anything he won’t. Lily is generous, kind and honest. But when it comes to leaping out of airplanes and running Iron Mans (called Hell Raisers in this book), she’ll choose “staying at home with a cuppa” every time. Still, Lily loves her tight-knit life and the Gazette. If plummeting to her death means putting out the paper one more year, she’s all for it. And with Christopher there to prop her up, she may even survive. Who knows? A near-death experience might be just what she needs to put aside her fear of commitment and find true love.

I was prepared to love this one—and I mean in a buying-it-and-rearranging-my-bookcase way. The bad news is I bought it. The good news is I won’t be rearranging my bookcase. I don’t mean to be harsh, but I was promised. Coleman’s cover calls this tale is “an absolutely perfect laugh-out-loud romantic comedy” in the spirit of “Marian Keyes, Mhairi McFarlane and Sophie Kinsella.” I laughed out loud exactly once. And I don’t find this story as satisfying as Kinsella’s worst novel. Lily’s concept of a newspaper is stunted by the fact she’s spent the last three years in the newsroom fielding classifieds and car ads. She doesn’t have experience in hard news and she thinks a feature is a four-page affair. Her cavalier approach to writing—which Coleman includes in the form of Lily’s weekly “feature”—made me cringe on more than one occasion. Lily has a lot to offer, but not journalism. The worst part is her fellow characters really believe in the power of Lily’s work.

Cute, but no cigar.