A review by dyerra
Next Year in Havana by Chanel Cleeton

1.0

This book started out horribly and then got slightly better, but was still bad. And in order to get to the better part you have to slog through half of the book where the main characters are swooning and trembling and tremoring all over the place. The first half of the book focuses on the two main characters (in two different eras) falling instantly in love with men, and frankly, the romance is poorly written. I am not a fan of romance anyway, but the author's attempt to . . . I'm not sure, build anticipation? In her readers just fell flat. Also, Ms. Cleeton demonstrated significant overuse of the thesaurus, sprinkling synonyms throughout the book with the carelessness of a child decorating a sugar cookie. After the characters finally hook up (I'm not even claiming this as a spoiler, it's incredibly obvious the whole time that they will), the book gets marginally better in that the poorly written romance is out of the way. The history of Cuba is interesting, but the vehicle chosen is not. Frankly, it would have been more engaging and informative to read the Wikipedia article and much less of a waste of time. After the romance, the plot is still flat, but at least you can stop cringing at the heavy-handed attempt at building passion. If you are intrigued by the description of the book, I suggest you just read a book about the history of Cuba and skip the novel altogether.