Reviews for No Sad Song

The average rating for No Sad Song based on 2 reviews is 2 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-07-23 00:00:00 Chad Tipton [Opera student heroine is obsessed, OBSESSED, with a letter sent to her by a fellow music student friend a few days before she committed suicide. "Piers says he will never marry me." Followed by a bunch more awful stuff about the womanizing, cold, cruel man who broke her heart. The Piers in question is a successful agent who once represented the suicidal friend and now wants to represent heroine. He pretty much bullies and manipulates heroine into accepting his representation even though she secretly loathes him and blames him for her friend's suicide. Follows a Svengali like transformation of the feisty little country bumpkin into a sophisticated opera Grande Dame complete with designer wardrobe and exclusive hair styling. Hero eventually confesses he has been stalking watching heroine for three years at her college recitals and knew her potential to become a big star under his tutelage but more than that, he wants a personal relationship with her too. Heroine pretends she likes him too thinking she will hook him and then dump him (at the cost of her own career) so he can get a taste of his own medicine. Well, of course, it isn't long before she realizes she has fallen head over heels for him. Despite many signs that he is not the cold, cruel persona who could be capable of pushing a young, impressionable girl into suicide (the guy fawns over a pair of playful foxes at the park for Pete'sake), heroine still goes on with her revenge plot, jilting him at the altar before taking herself off to have mopey moments. The unbelievably patient and forgiving hero tracks her down and finally spills the beans. When the heroine's friend wrote that "Piers says he will never marry me" she meant that "Piers says Jerry will never marry me," Jerry being the guy she was seeing at the time and who ruined her life with his debauched lifestyle of groupies, sex and rock'n'roll. The hero didn't want to answer heroine's accusations before because he was trying to guard the young woman's privacy after her tragic death but heroine's stupid grudge and revenge plot left him no choice but to finally give the heroine the sordid details of the friend's decline, details, he rightly points out, that the heroine herself should have been privy to, had she really been the good friend that she professed to be. Incredibly, hero asks heroine again to marry because, no matter what she did, he still loves her and always will. The heroine was a first-class donkey-face with shit for brains. The friend that she obsessed about, and because of whom she almost ruined her career, and her relationship with the man she loved, was a vague acquaintance who graduated from college while heroine was still in her first year, who didn't keep in touch with heroine for two years except for two measly letters, and who heroine never visited or called or made any efforts to get to know what was going on with her life in all that time. I believe she didn't even go to the funeral. Heroine took a sentence from a letter and built an entire Italian Opera around it, as the hero wryly observes, without any fact, or investigation into facts, to back it up. Bat. Shit. Crazy. On top of it all, heroine brazenly accepted a huge amount of financial assistance through an arts grant that the hero facilitated for her because he believed in her talent, not to mention free room and board, aforementioned designer duds, and free private lessons from a retired opera star that she would never have been able to afford otherwise. She did this all the while planning to viciously bite the hand that fed her. She deliberately accepted a grant that could have gone to a grateful, deserving student, knowing in advance how it would be wasted because she was going to sabotage herself in her quest for revenge and thus waste all the money, time and efforts expended on her by a group of people who put their efforts to enhance and benefit the arts for young people. So morally bankrupt and unethical! We are just going to have to be happy that the hero is happy. Maybe with any luck, he will make oogads of money from representing the heroine before she dumps him for a balding, stocky, sweaty Tenor who will make her quit her career in order to massage his vocal chords and hand him teacups and mints in between scenes of The Marriage of Figaro Don Giovanni. This would hopefully leave the coast clear for the hero to find a true HE A with a worthy, non-operatic, HPlandia heroine. Opera singer heroines in HPlandia are the worst! (hide spoiler)]

Review # 2 was written on 2014-03-26 00:00:00 Devin Jessee One of these days, these early edition Harlequins will be true classics. This is probably one of Alison York's best. Piers is an older man, an music agent, who's had his eye on a young talent, and recruits her straight out of school. Annabel, on the other hand, has heard of Piers Bellingham when her mentor wrote her a letter, hinting that Piers broke her heart, and soon afterwards, dying in a railway station. She hates Piers with a passion, but when her father was made redundant, she realized she had to sign up with Piers. He is autocratic but makes an effort to charm Annabel, who soon realizes that he's got it bad for her. She develops this plan to punish him for what he did to her beloved mentor, using, of course, his professed love for her. It all comes to a head when she starts developing feelings for him and her deception causes her singing to deteriorate. She then decides to jilt him at the altar (to conclude things) and then runs away. He chases after her to shake some sense into her, and she realizes that even after all she had done to him, he still wants her. A classic. A revenge love story well told and very believable.