by Stephanie (link)
Genre het, drama/angst, romance
Pairings Isaac/OFC, Taylor/OFC, Zac/OFC
Length prologue and 15 chapters
Status Unfinished (third story in The Cleo Trilogy)
After making it this far in the series, I’m already disappointed that the third story isn’t finished. I can appreciate that Stephanie struggled to write this story over several years, though, so I’m willing to review Best Laid Plans for what it is and try not to lament the lack of an ending.
Best Laid Plans begins two years after the conclusion of Happily Ever After, and a lot has happened in those years — a lot that I think I would have liked to read about. One of my favorite parts of the previous story was the first inklings of a relationship between Zac and Anne; now they’ve dated, broken and gotten back together and all of that happened “off stage.”
That seems to be the biggest problem with this story — so much of the drama has either already happened and is just seen in flashbacks or it happens to the secondary characters. I understand the desire to keep writing about your beloved characters, but there comes a point when you don’t have anything new to say about them or do to them. On the other hand, I think some of the drama of Best Laid Plans is better observed from a distance, although I’m still not a huge fan of how Stephanie reveals so much only through flashbacks.
One thing I will say for Best Laid Plans is that Stephanie definitely seems to have hit her stride with the prose. Cleo’s narration feels sufficiently adult and mature, and there are some really beautiful turns of phrase. There are still a few grammatical errors here and there, but they’re only a little distracting. The biggest frustration, as I already mentioned, is the cliffhanger ending that isn’t an ending at all. That isn’t made better by how long some of the chapters are, either, because some of them are also quite short. It all leaves me feeling like I wasted a lot of time on this trilogy, and I hate that feeling.
Review by Bethany (website)