Accidentally In Love With... A God?

Accidentally In Love With... A God?
By Mimi Jean Pamfiloff
Rating: 4 of 5 stars

My Review:
When the author intro at the beginning of the book says she hopes to make you laugh and have fun with this book, I have pretty high hopes that it'll be a good one. It didn't disappoint. I smiled and even had a few laughs. It makes a huge difference when you know going in that this story doesn't take itself too seriously. I think I might have been frustrated with the characters if I went into the story thinking that it was supposed to be serious fantasy romance.

Emma has heard a voice in her head for as long as she can remember. If I understood the timeline correctly, she's about 22 in this book. Just finished college, figuring out what she's going to do with her life, even trying to date around the objections of the voice in her head. But then out of nowhere (I sure didn't expect it!), she gets hit by a car and is in a coma for a month. When she wakes up, Guy (the voice in her head) has decided it's time to ratchet up the timetable in his head and she needs to fly to Mexico to free him.

The book was written first person when Emma is around and third person the rest of the time. It was hard switching back and forth to start with, but it got easier as I got more familiar with the story.

Personally I didn't like Guy all that much. He withheld so much information from Emma and refused to answer her questions pretty much always. I didn't get how Emma could really even like him through at least the first half of the book. He had this whole paternal, I'm-protecting-you sort of thing going on, but he was asking Emma to do so much on simply blind trust. He had the whole god-thing going where everyone should just do what he says simply because he's the top of the food chain. It's not that he was exactly lacking in compassion, but that it was only big-picture compassion for all-the-humans and Emma by default because of her humanity.

In the end, he got much better. He started acting less like a god and more like a person, with empathy and mutuality towards Emma and he developed a personality with interests and feelings. You could feel the vulnerability open up inside him as he accepted that Emma was actually special to him in a way different from simply human. It doesn't mean he stopped screwing up after that, but he did start behaving in a more empathetic, less manipulative way.

Emma was strong and resilient. Although she's maneuvered quite a bit by Guy, she never felt like the shrinking violet. She doesn't have a lot of control of her life, but she never gave up and she never stopped having her own feelings and beliefs. I didn't always like her decisions and she could definitely be impulsive but I did love her internal monologue. She was funny and I felt she acted in a believable way.

The story was fast-paced and amusing. I wouldn't say there were many plot twists or complicated scenarios. It all seemed pretty straightforward and you pretty much knew who did what early on. I felt the characters could have shown a bit more emotion. We're told something hurt, but they give no physical indication that anything bad just happened. A little more showing instead of telling would have made the characters more real in my mind and pulled me into the story a bit more.

This felt like a complete story, but there were still a bunch of plot questions in my head when I finished. I'm anxious to see if some of the open ends of the plot are tied up in subsequent books. So I will definitely check out the other books in this series. It was a great book to sit and relax with and it kept a smile on my face and I hope the rest of the series lives up to that as well.