Service Call

by Heather Black from the April 1, 2019 issue

Tagline: After her divorce, Jennifer Campbell moved to a new town looking for a fresh start. And when she came across hunky neighborhood repairman Justin Roe, all it took was a broken furnace to ignite new hope in her heart.

Observations: I liked probably 85% of this story. In fact, I totally laughed when Justin said he'd be at her house within an hour to fix her furnace because when has a repairman ever said that in real life??? LOL However, near the end I hit a couple of speed bumps and then I had a problem with the ending as well.

Please remember what I say here is only my opinion and does not mean this isn't a good or well-written story. It just means I'm a nit-picky, opinionated person. Obviously, the editorial staff liked it enough to publish.

The first thing I wanted to point out is a "mistake" I often see in Woman's World stories that I've edited for people--failing to leverage an emotional moment for maximum impact. Here, it's that moment when Justin asks if she'd like to take a ride together on Saturday. Throughout the whole story, Jennifer has been riding past his house for a month and mooning over him, wanting something to happen. When it finally does, this is what we get:

"I'd like that,[sic]" Jennifer smiled as Justin hefted his toolbox to leave.

If this had been my story, I'd have added 2 or 3 sentences to expand on this moment to talk about her reaction to finally having gotten his attention and realizing that the attraction was mutual. (The author may have made the choice to be sparse here because of the way the story ended. More on that in a moment.)

Then, after having been pretty deep in Jennifer's POV, we change to Justin's for one paragraph. This was particularly jolting. I liked the information--it gave us a bit of interesting info about Justin. He's a fast thinker. LOL And he likes Jennifer enough to buy a bike so he can spend time with her. However, after that one sentence in Justin's POV, we return to Jennifer's.

As a writer, I would have given a lot of thought to whether the information we get in Justin's POV is worth making the reader switch points of view twice. In my opinion, it was not.

And then, we find out that Jennifer sabotaged her own furnace to contrive a reason to call Justin.

For some reason--perhaps an overly sensitive conscience--I didn't like this sneaky behavior. It's weird, though, because when other characters, like matchmakers, best friends, or co-workers, are sneaky on the protagonists' behalf, I'm fine with it. But this made me not like Jennifer as much as I had before. Then, when I re-read the story, it occurred to me that Justin lied too, when he said "I also happen to love bike riding." While that white lie didn't bother me at all on the first reading, it did stand out more upon the second.

I'm absolutely certain that great numbers of people (including the editors) will not have this reaction to the story. (It also appeared in the April 1 issue, so maybe it was a slight nod to April Fool's Day?) So, as always, take this with a grain of salt. I think it comes down to personal preference.

Photo credit: (nutmeg) via Flickr CC license