Kyrie
Maid for Montero was filled to the brim with clichés, but the book had its moments.
I went in expecting a cheesy romance, and while there was plenty of cheese to be had (as well as some confusing POV jumps, and time skips), I enjoyed it a bit more than I thought I would, given the synopsis.
It was less...sleazy, that's the word I'm looking for. It was less sleazy than the synopsis makes the premise sound.
Zoe, the heroine, went a long way towards making this a bearable read. The woman deserves some sort of award for being the first pure romance heroine I've read in ages who realizes that it isn't right to look down on other women's love lives.
A vet who recently went through a pretty bad divorce was flirting it up with Isandro (the love interest) at a party, and Zoe began to mentally tear down the lady vet for putting her grubby, recently-divorced hands all over him. But then...
Zoe felt a stab of shame. The woman was vulnerable and needed sympathy, not catty remarks behind her back. She actually deserved admiration - she had come out fighting after being kicked in the teeth.
That sentiment isn't returned later by the lady vet, but still! I was just so happy to see Zoe realize that what she was doing wasn't fair to the lady vet.
The POV jumps and time skips made the story line somewhat difficult to keep up with. You can understand the story just fine, but everything is just kind of jumbled together.
For instance, the book starts with Isandro's perspective, and then Zoe walks into the room and the story switches to Zoe's perspective in the next paragraph, and then a few paragraphs later it goes right back to Isandro.
The back-and-forth is fine in the first half of the book or so, and gives a nice look at how both Isandro and Zoe are reading the situation as it happens. But after their inevitable hook-up, things just kind of fall to pieces.
The POV jumps increase, until we're switching between perspectives with every paragraph in some places, and then there will be paragraphs that switch from third person to first person, which is the only indication given that you're suddenly hearing Zoe or Isandro's personal thoughts, as they're thinking them.
That could have just been a formatting error, I suppose. You'd normally expect to see inner monologue set in italics, but these were the same font as everything else in the book.
Finally, the last quarter of the book starts jumping forward in time, skipping over huge chunks of Zoe and Isandro's relationship. They'll be talking about one thing one moment, and then the next it's a week later, and their previous conversation (usually) never gets mentioned again. There are a few occasions where the conversation is plot critical, and it gets mentioned once more. At the end of the book.
Maid for Montero was filled to the brim with clichés, but the book had its moments.
I went in expecting a cheesy romance, and while there was plenty of cheese to be had (as well as some confusing POV jumps, and time skips), I enjoyed it a bit more than I thought I would, given the synopsis.
It was less...sleazy, that's the word I'm looking for. It was less sleazy than the synopsis makes the premise sound.
Zoe, the heroine, went a long way towards making this a bearable read. The woman deserves some sort of award for being the first pure romance heroine I've read in ages who realizes that it isn't right to look down on other women's love lives.
A vet who recently went through a pretty bad divorce was flirting it up with Isandro (the love interest) at a party, and Zoe began to mentally tear down the lady vet for putting her grubby, recently-divorced hands all over him. But then...
Zoe felt a stab of shame. The woman was vulnerable and needed sympathy, not catty remarks behind her back. She actually deserved admiration - she had come out fighting after being kicked in the teeth.
That sentiment isn't returned later by the lady vet, but still! I was just so happy to see Zoe realize that what she was doing wasn't fair to the lady vet.
The POV jumps and time skips made the story line somewhat difficult to keep up with. You can understand the story just fine, but everything is just kind of jumbled together.
For instance, the book starts with Isandro's perspective, and then Zoe walks into the room and the story switches to Zoe's perspective in the next paragraph, and then a few paragraphs later it goes right back to Isandro.
The back-and-forth is fine in the first half of the book or so, and gives a nice look at how both Isandro and Zoe are reading the situation as it happens. But after their inevitable hook-up, things just kind of fall to pieces.
The POV jumps increase, until we're switching between perspectives with every paragraph in some places, and then there will be paragraphs that switch from third person to first person, which is the only indication given that you're suddenly hearing Zoe or Isandro's personal thoughts, as they're thinking them.
That could have just been a formatting error, I suppose. You'd normally expect to see inner monologue set in italics, but these were the same font as everything else in the book.
Finally, the last quarter of the book starts jumping forward in time, skipping over huge chunks of Zoe and Isandro's relationship. They'll be talking about one thing one moment, and then the next it's a week later, and their previous conversation (usually) never gets mentioned again. There are a few occasions where the conversation is plot critical, and it gets mentioned once more. At the end of the book.