Netgalley: Scent of Rain

Scent of Rain by Kristen Billerbeck

Daphne Sweeten has been trained to be a professional "nose," a gifted perfume creator who can recongnize 1000's of different smells.  Well, she used to recognize smells.  After being jilted at the alter, Daphne's sense of smell is gone, vanished into thin air.  Worse still, she gave up the perfect job in Paris to move to Dayton, OH for her fiancee, the one who, like her best sense, is no where to be found.

Daphne must now create great smelling household products without actually smelling them.  Can she mask her issues enough to keep her new job and convince her boss, Jesse, that's she worth the addition to his budget?  Can Jesse move past his past to give Daphne the chance she deserves?

My Thoughts:

I'm a big Kristen Billerbeck fan (love the Spa Girls series), but this one just did not cut it for me.  My first problem was there were numerous cheesy lines in the book about smelling and the sense of smell.  My eyes almost hurt from rolling them so much.

I thought the ending was horrible.  I literally clicked back a page when I saw the words "Epilogue."  Surely the book wasn't done.  Nothing had been resolved.  After reading the epilogue a few issues were resolved but there was so much story, especially concerning Mark, the ex-fiancee, that I thought still needed to be told.

I also had a hard time following some of the timing in the book.  There was one reference to a date, but I didn't know if a week had gone by or two weeks or what.  It seems like a new section would start up and the characters would be somewhere different but we weren't told where they were or how they got there.  I had to look back in the book several times to figure those out.

Lastly, I thought it was totally unrealistic that Daphne would fall in love again so quickly after being left at the altar.  If she loved her fiancee so much that she was going to marry him, how could her affections change so quickly?

Overall, the premise of the book was unique but there were too many problems with the telling of the story for me to give this a good review.

I give this book 2 out of 5 stars.

I received a complementary Kindle version of this book through NetGalley.  All opinions are my own.