DNF Review: Parallel Roads

Title: Parallel Roads
Author: Mel Teshsco
Publisher: Escape Publishing
Release Date: March 2016
Length: 139 pages
Series?: no
Genre: Science Fiction, Romance

What would you do, if you had the chance to revisit all your decisions, to fix all your mistakes?

Celebrity chef, Jessie McCormick is incredibly late. Driving his Hummer to the opening of his latest restaurant seemed like a much better idea than flying, but incomprehensible directions and a dodgy shortcut throws him instead into the driveway of a rickety old house. Hopeful of finding the house occupied – and its inhabitants capable of directing him to Brisbane – he heads inside.

Voices lead him into the attic, and there he finds no direction – and every direction. The attic is an endless line of doors and ladders, each taking Jessie down a different path of his life. In one, he is a celebrity chef, fêted by the world. In another, his mother is still alive. In a third, his beloved sister is dead.

But in all of them is a small, dusty town and a small, dusty restaurant, run by a woman named Tara. As Jessie races to find his way back to his own life, he must make the biggest decision of his life: rescue his sister or take his chance at true love.

Find the book: Goodreads | Amazon

The Players

Jessie – celebrity chef with personal and family troubles, possibly professional as well

Tara – blonde, failing diner owner in a run-down town

The Quote

Was it possible he really had had some strange, psychotic episode? Was the stress of his career, predominately his television cooking show, getting to him? Add possible heat exhaustion, along with his pathetic personal life, and it was probably just a matter of time before something within him unraveled.

The Highs and Lows

The beginning was kind of strange, and then things took an even stranger turn, and I’m not too sure about it. Jessie discovers a way to travel through time, and takes Tara – the diner owner he just met and has instantly hooked up with and fallen in love with in one night – with him. What persues is a strange alternate reality of the one they lived in. A Twilight Zone of possible pasts.

I tried following what little plot was available in this rogshod cruise of discovery in Jessie’s Hummer, but there just wasn’t anything to keep me interested. The circumstances of Jessie and Tara’s meeting and sudden clinging love story out of a one-night stand and riding off into the sunset together was just too unrealistic. The character growth and story development that should have been present fell flat.

Around 1/4 of the book I was getting frustrated feeling like I was reading in circles. The last few times I’ve picked it up to read I have fallen asleep – and not because I was reading at bedtime. I couldn’t read this book for more than five minutes. Finally at the 1/3 mark I decided to DNF. There are just too many other good books out there. I can’t wait around to figure out the plot of a story that the author doesn’t seem to know herself.

 

The Take-Away

The author might have a great story to tell, but she hasn’t finessed her writing enough to tell it. Even nearly 1/3 of the way in, I still had no idea where this storyline was going, or what was going on.

Recommendation – Buy, Borrow or Skip? 

Skip.

Mel Teshco grew up in Australia, where her seemingly gypsy dad and ever patient mother saw her living in many areas of the East Coast, along with her sister and two brothers.

Each new home stimulated an already over-active imagination, where she spent as much time dreaming about fantasy worlds as the real world – the fantasy sometimes being much better.
Now living on a small rural property with three horses and a handful or two of cats, she is happily married with three children of wide-spread ages and a stepson.

Not only does she adore writing darker-style paranormals, she also enjoys writing paranormal erotica and has some published works with Ellora’s Cave.

Find the author: Website | Goodreads