As most of Nora Roberts books this one is outstanding. They made it into a movie, but it was in no way close to the book. You will really enjoy
this book.

My first question is... How on earth did this woman get published? This book started out great and I was excited to see the story unfold. As I kept reading, I got more and more frustrated. My friend was reading one of her series and told me that the men in those books were all pizza eating, beer drinking card board cut outs too. Declan got on my nerves.

Then the big twist, which I won't spoil if someone is desperate enough to read this, made me shake my head and scoff. Its hard for me to leave books unfinished, so I kept with this one until the very last page... Then I wondered why I had just wasted so much of my life, when I could have been reading something worth my time. Maybe because I hate romance novels, I can't stand Nora Roberts. I can't stand Nick Sparks either.

I've read and enjoyed almost all of Nora Robert's books. Midnight Bayou, however, was a huge disappointment. I loved the book up until about the last 20 pages. Then it seemed as if Nora handed the manuscript to someone else and said "here, you finish it", someone who didn't understand the characters' personalities or the depth of the story.

Hopefully this is not a sign of things to come with Mrs. Roberts.

Nora Roberts is a sure genius behind suspense novels. Midnight Bayou is just one of them. This novel tells a story about ghosts and reincarnation among Declan and Angelina. It reminds you of watching a Japanese horror flick such as the Grudge. Be sure to watch the Lifetime Original Movie by 2009 with Jerry O'Connell and Lauren Stamile.

I always wonder why I dislike this one when so many people absolutely love it, so I tried to analyze my feelings during this re-read.

First off, I deliberately ignored the fact that I didn't like it when I read it before. But no such luck. I just never really connected with this book.

This is what I came up with:

* It starts with the story of Lucian and Abigail, who are not the main characters. In fact, they're long dead, and tragically.
* There is zero conflict until about two-thirds of the way through the book, but that turns out to be pretty much a non-issue.
* We get told a lot that Declan fell in love with Lena at first sight, and even get a list of things he finds admirable about her, which is nice, but I didn't see any chemistry between them, despite the sex scenes.
* Lena does that tiresome I'm-afraid-of-relationships thing that is the absolute lamest excuse for conflict in a romance novel and makes me want to chuck it against the wall.
* We don't find out until over halfway through the book that the whole point of it is for Declan to figure out what happened to Lucian and Abigail, which is kind of pointless, since we readers have known since the beginning, and there are no consequences if he doesn't--the ghosts are annoying, but not threatening.
* The reincarnation stuff again didn't have a lot of point to it, and made an already lackluster romance between Declan and Lena worse because it seems they had no choice in the matter anyway.
* I'm not a POV purist, by any means, but since one of my biggest problems with Midnight Bayou is that I didn't connect with the characters, and since that's one of the consequences of headhopping, the fact that there is a lot of headhopping might have something to do with it.

So. I feel better because I think I've given this book a fair shot, and now I can identify reasons why I didn't like it. Even what happened to Declan near the end of the book didn't endear him to me as it did so many readers.

Why three stars? That last third of the book moved pretty well, and the characters were engaging by that point.