Astrid Hawk
I had low expectations, but this was even worse than I expected. I'm not a huge romance reader, but I think every once in awhile it's fun to read one as sort of a guilty pleasure (not that there's anything wrong with being a romance reader, but there's rarely anything with greater meaning in these stories, so I know that picking one up is just for a diversion). Lately, my choices have mostly just shown me what romance readers do and don't like, rather than giving me that fun diversion. This one was a particularly low point, and I'm struggling to understand why genre readers like it enough for it to have higher than a 4 star average on GR.
For a "romantic comedy", there really wasn't much romantic or comedic. The romance was mostly lustful obsession, occasionally punctuated by the characters thinking about how "special" the other person was just to provide some token sense that they weren't just driven by lust (which they absolutely were). The comedy consisted of absurd and wildly uncomfortable scenes that were too awkward and contrived and full of grotesque imagery to be funny. I don't mind spice, but I found myself dreading and wanting to skim past the sex scenes in this book (and there were quite a lot) - they just felt like hindrances for getting on with the story, and they were often cringey. The final conflict in the last 50 pages should have been meaningful, but it was overdone, and because the author wanted a happy ending, the FMC ends up reverting to her vapid, lustful self from the beginning of the book and allows herself to be physically subdued into accepting a resolution to the conflict.
Sadly, would not recommend, even for a known quantity diversion. It's just cringey. Look elsewhere.
I had low expectations, but this was even worse than I expected. I'm not a huge romance reader, but I think every once in awhile it's fun to read one as sort of a guilty pleasure (not that there's anything wrong with being a romance reader, but there's rarely anything with greater meaning in these stories, so I know that picking one up is just for a diversion). Lately, my choices have mostly just shown me what romance readers do and don't like, rather than giving me that fun diversion. This one was a particularly low point, and I'm struggling to understand why genre readers like it enough for it to have higher than a 4 star average on GR.
For a "romantic comedy", there really wasn't much romantic or comedic. The romance was mostly lustful obsession, occasionally punctuated by the characters thinking about how "special" the other person was just to provide some token sense that they weren't just driven by lust (which they absolutely were). The comedy consisted of absurd and wildly uncomfortable scenes that were too awkward and contrived and full of grotesque imagery to be funny. I don't mind spice, but I found myself dreading and wanting to skim past the sex scenes in this book (and there were quite a lot) - they just felt like hindrances for getting on with the story, and they were often cringey. The final conflict in the last 50 pages should have been meaningful, but it was overdone, and because the author wanted a happy ending, the FMC ends up reverting to her vapid, lustful self from the beginning of the book and allows herself to be physically subdued into accepting a resolution to the conflict.
Sadly, would not recommend, even for a known quantity diversion. It's just cringey. Look elsewhere.