ARC Reader Review: Outback Bacelor Ball Series - Powerful, Passionate and Poignant!

Penning down a book – even a novella – as a part of a multi-author series is quite an accomplishment to master. Though in all my experience as a reader of multi-author novels there has never been a time when the personalities of the overlapping characters have changed in between – to the authors’ absolute credit – such perfect segueing of the plot-lines as seen in the multi-author series of the Outback Bachelor Ball series has also been rare for me.

 Joan Kilby’s Win Me; Karina Bliss’ Woo Me and Sarah Mayberry’s Wait for Me deals with the life of three best friends – Ellie McFarlane, Jen Tremaine and Beth Walker respectively, each of whom who have been left disappointed in the romance department. Best friends since school days, they are not only each other’s rocks, but each is also no-nonsense in her ability to call out the other two in case the scenario necessitates it. And though they are separated by distance, their friendship is rock-solid as ever – thanks to modern-day communicational technologies.

Individualistic as the author who created them, each of these female protagonists has a different take on life and what they want of it. Ellie’s love is steady and unabated by distance or time, while Jen’s previous experiences have made her out to be cynical (though I term it to be realistic) yet warily optimistic at the same time. And then there’s Beth, who’s struggling to cope with the fall-out of her celebrity-status-by-association, and trying to come out of it anew.

The three friends catch up with each other, and dare each other to do the one thing each has been shying away from at the Outback Bachelor and Spinster Ball. The event provides the perfect backdrop for start of good things for the three school-friends, with the troika least expecting it.

It’s then with little bit of cautiousness peppered with some amount of daredevilry that Ellie, Jen and Beth – along with Clarabelle, who has a major role in fixing up Jen’s cynicism-infused take on life’s realism – take up on the headiness that life has had to offer them at the Ball.

The winding-down, amidst the settling down of the dust of the Ball's revelry however isn’t as comfortable as each would have hoped for, with the past hurts seeming to ricocheting all over again. But it’s in the face of these demoralising eventualities that the distinctive assertiveness of Ellie, Jen and Beth comes out making the reader fall in love with them all over again.