Surprise Daddy by Nicole Snow ARC review

Surprise Daddy by Nicole Snow

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


3.75/5

I’m really struggling with this review, so let me just put it all out there. Surprise Daddy is the first book I’ve read by Nicole Snow. I received an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I’m going to be honest and say I’ve never heard of Nicole Snow before, which isn’t a bad thing by any means. Word of mouth or social media is sometimes how we find our next favorite author. That being said I don’t know if I would consider her a favorite of mine, just yet anyway.

The writing style of this author, or at least this book since I have no frame of reference for any of her other novels, is not one I usually enjoy. It is written in 1st person POV and at times it rambles on so quickly I lost track of what was happening. Now I will admit, this is only the 2nd author I’ve read that uses the 1st person POV for storytelling. 99% of what I read is the standard 2nd person or even 3rd person storytelling with secondary character interactions. With the previous novels I read using this format, it took me a few pages of the 1st book to catch on but then it was easy to keep track in the subsequent novels. In Surprise Daddy it took me almost a full chapter to get the flow and even then it moved so fast sometimes I lost track of who was talking. Little Mia would sometimes get lost in the adult narrative and I would have to re-read to see her little girl wisdom in the story.

Surprise Daddy is a novel about Sarah “Sadie” Kelley and Marshal Howard. Sadie is back home trying to get herself established after leaving school to help out at home. Marshal is ex military and the town outcast trying to raise his young daughter as a single father. Sadie applies for a job as nanny to little Mia and gets involved with Marshal and sees the stigma he carries. There is also a backstory between Marshal and Jackson (Sadie’s brother).

I must admit the strong warring character personalities of Marshal are a little off-putting and far apart at times. He is a hard-nosed, rude talking, arrogant, know it all who dotes on his daughter. He rudely speaks to each person he encounters in the first few pages while sweet talking Mia. He obviously struggles with who he is now but it seems so manic sometimes I find it not realistic. Then it takes only a few speaking up moments by Sadie to get him falling in love already with her, sweet-talking her up and down. I’m all for the fall in love fast scenarios but even this one seemed rushed. And it so randomly comes up that she is a virgin, didn’t understand that one but it didn’t have a great impact on anything anyway.

This book has some typos, missing words, spelling errors etc. Reading an ebook I never know if that is just typing input errors not reflected in the paperback etc but it’s all I have to reference at the moment. There are lots of nicknames in this book, some good, some cute, not ignorant and rude. Marshal calls Sadie “Red”, the town calls Marshal “castoff”, Marshal calls Mia “honeybee”, Sadie calls Marshal “crasshole” it goes on and on. I’m not sure I am a fan of having a character have that type of stigma associated with them to where even Sadie’s parents call him “castoff”.

I would have liked to dive more into Sadie’s mothers mental issues and see if we could better understand her. She seemed to only have a placement as a conflict back ground player.

I did look at some other reviews after I finished the ARC. I did see a few that mentioned Surprise Daddy wasn’t written in the same style as some other books written by Nicole Snow. Even though this book had me confused and trying to stay focused throughout most of it and some places felt extremely rushed, I would probably give the author another chance to wow me. This story had potential, loads of potential but I didn’t feel like it was addressed well enough to make me invested in this story.




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