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| 0425233804
| 9780425233801
| 0425233804
| 4.30
| 12,163
| Jan 01, 2010
| Apr 06, 2010
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did not like it
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This book was a disappointment. I haven’t read every book in the Breeds series, but I’ve read enough to have met Jonas before and liked him. And this
This book was a disappointment. I haven’t read every book in the Breeds series, but I’ve read enough to have met Jonas before and liked him. And this book just didn’t do him justice. His mate, Rachel, was an annoying little ice queen who treated Jonas like dirt for most of the book. I couldn’t stand her. And the overarching plot was barely there, so there was nothing to distract me from the awful relationship. (view spoiler)[ The story begins with Jonas being forced to accept Rachel as his personal assistant. She’s already pregnant by another man, which I wasn’t a fan of, and she treats Jonas with complete disrespect most of the time. She just flat out refuses most of his orders and he’s got no way of disciplining her because someone higher up in the pride has given him a direct order to employ her. So he just has to sit there and take it. We’re also told that he recognized her as his mate as soon as he saw her, but he doesn’t want to claim her, because of everything that brings with it. So after their first inauspicious meeting were she acts aloof and disrespectful, the story breaks and suddenly it’s seven months later. Rachel is rushing into the office in the middle of the night, having been roughed up by some bad guys. These bad guys are holding her daughter hostage and she has been told to bring back some mysterious “file” to give to them. Jonas is there and she goes berserk screeching about how this is all his fault. That being around him has put her and her daughter in danger and he’s going to hand over those files immediately because she won’t allow him to play games with her daughter’s life. All of this was extremely confusing. Just what the h*ll is going on here? Some men are holding her baby hostage? When was the baby even born? Last time we saw Rachel, she was only 5 months pregnant! And why didn’t we read about these bad guys bursting into Rachel’s house?? Why do we skip that exciting plot point and instead just come in on her going to steal the files? And what file is this? What’s in it? Why does the bad guy want it? And why is she blaming Jonas, of all people, for this event? Why didn’t she call him for help the moment she was let go? Just what the H*LL is happening??!!? This whole scene was just really poorly written. Jonas tells Rachel that handing over the file won’t save her baby, Amber, because the bad guys will just kill her and Rachel both anyway. Rachel admits that she knew this already, she’d seen it in their eyes. So again, then WHY THE H*LL WERE YOU JUST GOING TO GO BACK THERE AND GIVE THEM THE FILE IF YOU KNEW IT MEANT YOUR DEATH?? Jonas pulls together some men, bursts into the house, rescues the baby, and then the house is blown sky-high. Jonas is hurt in the battle. He’s got glass imbedded in him from jumping through the window, and is just bruised and battered from absorbing the blast in order to protect the baby. Rachel doesn’t give Jonas even a passing thought, and certainly not a thank you for saving Amber’s life. She just keeps saying it’s all Jonas’s fault anyway, for putting them in danger. Never mind that Jonas had never wanted her to work for him in the first place, but was forced into it. Never mind that Rachel knows perfectly well that psychos are always gunning for the breeds, so she knew all along that there was an element of risk to the job but she took it anyway. And never mind that the breeds are the victims here and shouldn’t be blamed when psycho bad guys attack them. But yeah, let’s just blame Jonas for everything, it’s totally all his fault. They take Amber to The Sanctuary where the medical staff check her out. They baby is lethargic, so they’re sure the bad guy injected her with something. The bad guy is a doctor who wants to try to use the breeds to make people immortal, since once they’re mated they don’t age anymore, and the breeds have tangled with him before. But after all the tests, they don’t find anything and Amber seems to be getting better so they release her. Jonas insists that Rachel and Amber will stay with him now, until the doctor can be caught. Rachel kicks up a fuss about this, because that’s what she always does. She’s just a very unpleasant person all the way around. She yells at and blames Jonas for everything, while never appreciating anything he does for her. Unfortunately, things just get worse from there. Because Jonas’s beast has recognized Rachel as his mate, he’s being eaten alive with the symptoms of the mating heat. And having her close by just makes it worse for him. He doesn’t want to kiss her, which will infect her with the hormones and send her into heat as well. He wants her to love him for who he is as a man, not to be forced to be with him by the hormones. Rachel knows full well that he’s recognized her as his mate but she blows this off. Saying that she “doesn’t agree” to be his mate and that’s that. She’s got absolutely no regard for the physical torture he’s put through every day just by being close to her. Like, not at ALL. She’s flippant about the whole thing, saying that “he’s got a hand” as if it’s just a normal case of blue balls and she’s got no sympathy for him at all. But she goes even further than that, but asking to touch and taste him. Even letting him use his fingers to bring her pleasure, while not getting any himself. And she’s just TOTALLY FINE with that. Still doesn’t think there’s anything wrong with her getting hers while he just burns in agony forever. I honestly hate this woman. I mean, seriously, I get it. The idea that she has to be tied to Jonas forever just because of some pre-determined mating thing that’s totally out of her control is weird and scary. I’d be a bit wary of it too, and probably wouldn’t want to get a dose of the hormones that I know would take away my free will on the subject. But there’s a difference between being scared of losing your free will and doing everything you can to stay away from the person you’re mated to…and being a c*ck-teasing b*tch who’s totally fine with using the guy to get hers and just leaving him high and dry. Seriously. She doesn’t care about Jonas AT ALL. And this goes on THE WHOLE BOOK. She never stops to think about how Jonas is just as screwed by this cosmic pre-destined mating thing as she is. Maybe he’d like a mate who wasn’t such a nasty b*tch and who actually cared whether he lived or died. But guess what? He doesn’t get a choice either. Only difference is, he’s in agony while all this is going on and she’s totally fine. But yeah, poor Rachel, it’s all about her and how this situation was thrust upon her. And that’s basically the whole book. Rachel acts like a b*tch, Jonas does everything he can to be nice to her and protect her and Amber. He gives her pleasure on multiple occasions, which she’s perfectly happy to take, but he doesn’t get any relief at all and she couldn’t care less. They go into the lab for tests on like four different occasions, which was repetitive and boring to read, considering that they never got any answers from those tests. At one point Rachel asks Jonas if he loves her and he says that he does, and loves Amber too, but then for the whole rest of the book Rachel behaves as if she doesn’t know how Jonas feels about her. Then Amber’s real father turns up and tries to have the baby removed from Rachel’s custody, saying that the baby is obviously in danger because of her association with the breeds. But that plan gets foiled because the father had told Rachel to get an abortion and when she didn’t he legally relinquished all his rights to the kid, wanting nothing whatsoever to do with her. So his sudden claims of concern for her are an obvious farce. Here Rachel finds out that Jonas had already taken steps to legally declare Rachel his mate and to recognize the baby as his responsibility. Under Breed law that basically makes him her father. These steps make it so that the baby is safe and Rachel’s ex can’t legally do anything about it. You’d think Rachel would be happy that Jonas’s forethought had prevented Amber from being taken, but no, she’s just pissed at him for not telling her about it first. Then Rachel, Jonas, and Amber go to a dinner with a bunch of people. Someone named Leo and Elizabeth, as well as some others. Apparently they’re actually Jonas’s parents, but they’ve never acknowledged him? It was weird. Jonas was created in a lab, using Leo’s DNA, but that DNA had also been altered, to try to make Jonas someone who would sire other breeds with genes that would make them killers, or something like that. His whole life he’d been told that the female scientist who’d carried him to term had also been the donor of the egg that he’d come from. That, in addition to whatever they’d done to the Leo’s DNA had made Jonas different-enough that they’d never recognized him as a son. Leo had always referred to his as an “unwanted genetic by-blow” and similar things. But at some point Jonas came to realize that he’d actually been lied to, and Elizabeth’s egg had been used for him, so he was actually a full-blooded son to the mated Leo and Elizabeth, even though they’d never acknowledged him. At this dinner, and at pretty much every other encounter, the Leo just picks and picks at Jonas, trying to get him to do things Leo’s way. Trying to get him to admit that the Leo’s chosen sanctuary, in Africa, is safer that living in the states. I don’t know, I wasn’t really following it and it just sounded like the Leo was a giant @sshole for no reason. Especially when we later on find out that he and Elizabeth also know that Jonas is their full-blooded son, they’ve just never told him that they know. The Leo even has the audacity to be hurt that Jonas has never done them the courtesy of acknowledging them as his parents, even though they’ve been nothing but awful to him since they met him, and never did anything to try to rescue him from the lab where he was being horribly mistreated his whole life? So Jonas and Rachel leave, after having another fight with the Leo. Jonas is pretty much at the end of his rope. He’s in constant agony because of the mating hormones, and now he’s just taken an emotional beating from his father who won’t acknowledge him. He feels that he needs to get away, his control has been stretched to his limit. But then Rachel just kisses him, deliberately forcing her tongue into his mouth so that she’ll get infected by the mating hormone. Apparently she’s finally decided she wants to be his mate after all. So they go back to their place and finally have sex a few times. They go back to the lab for more tests, which Rachel says will be the last time because she totally over giving samples to these people. And the Leo corners her and starts poking at her. Suddenly she’s all about defending her man, even though she’s been treating him like dirt the whole book. She tells Leo that he’s a terrible father and he treats Jonas bad and should be ashamed of himself. Leo apparently finds this amusing and says that Rachel is a worthy mate for his son, as if anyone cared. Then Jonas and Rachel have to go to some meeting, but when they get in the limo they find out it’s a trap and the doctor is there. He for some reason expected them to bring the baby with them and he’s really keen to get his hands on the baby. Jonas’s team show up, kill all the guards and Amber’s real father, who was also there for some reason. Jonas is about to kill the doctor, but he says that if they do, they’ll never learn what he did to Amber. He claims that he’s injected her with something that’s slow-acting, because he knew they’d subject her to every test imaginable when they got her back, but that it’s still doing its thing inside her. They take him back to the Sanctuary instead. And that’s the end. We don’t get any answers. Overall it just wasn’t an enjoyable read. I hated Rachel from start to finish, and feel like we never even got to know who she was. She didn’t have a back story, other than that her ex abandoned her when he found out she was pregnant. Who she was before that is anyone’s guess. She didn’t have any interests, other than taking care of her baby. No hobbies, or anything. She was just a non-person. And the only things we do learn about her are bad. That she’s just a heartless b*tch to everyone, but especially to Jonas. Blaming him for things that aren’t his fault and never being grateful for anything he does to try to protect her. Never caring about the pain she was causing him. I just never believed that she cared about Jonas at all, at any point in the book. She had the hots for him, but she didn’t seem to even like him as a person. So I don’t believe in their HEA, and I’m sad that Jonas got saddled with this nasty cow. (hide spoiler)] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Dec 29, 2021
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Dec 29, 2021
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Mass Market Paperback
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| 0778320146
| 9780778320142
| 0778320146
| 3.90
| 4,063
| Jul 01, 1998
| Feb 23, 2004
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it was ok
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I’m going to have to agree with all of the other negative reviews of this book. The beginning was great. The rest of it? Not so much. And the problem
I’m going to have to agree with all of the other negative reviews of this book. The beginning was great. The rest of it? Not so much. And the problem was the heroine. (view spoiler)[ The story opens with Melody in a hostage situation in some unnamed country where the insurgents all wear robes and sandals and have very negative opinions of women. She was an administrative assistant in the US embassy and the government has been overthrown by these dangerous rebels. They’ve taken over the embassy and Mel and two other Americans are being held hostage. They haven’t been hurt so far and Mel has disguised herself so that they don’t know she’s a woman. Harlan “Cowboy” Jones is one of the Navy SEALs sent in to rescue the hostages. This is one of the things that bugged me throughout the story. SB couldn’t seem to settle on what she wanted the characters to call the hero. Half the time the heroine referred to him as “Cowboy”, sometimes as “Jones”, and only very occasionally as “Harlan”. It was irritating and made me fixate on the name instead of being swept up in the story. I’m just going to call him Jones for the rest of the review because it’s the shortest. Jones is already a little taken with Mel before he goes in to rescue her, having found her photograph very appealing. Then when he sees how resourceful she was in hiding her gender, he’s impressed. They escape without incident, but then the helicopter that was supposed to pick them up is a no-show, meaning they’ll have to find another way across the border. They all split up and Mel says that she wants to go with Jones. It’s pretty obvious to everyone there that she’s developed a hero-worship crush on him. Jones and Mel go with another man named Harvard while the rest of the group heads off in other directions. This setup makes it so that there’s no chance of any hanky panky while they’re still running for their lives, which is probably the right thing and more realistic, but a little disappointing from a romance novel perspective. They make it to an airfield and Jones goes in alone, leaving Mel and Harvard behind. He ends up killing four insurgents in a knife fight before disabling all of the planes except the one they’re going to use to escape. That all goes off without a hitch too and soon they’re landing in friendly territory. The runway is swarmed with ambulances and Red Cross workers but before they disembark, Mel asks what’s going to happen now. Will she ever see Jones again? He explains that they’ll be separated and checked by doctors and debriefed but that he’ll come to her hotel room that night. Then he kisses her senseless. The story picks up seven months later and I felt gypped. We didn’t get to see any of the time Mel and Jones spent together on this whirlwind affair. We’re told that they spent several days together, mostly in bed, but we don’t get to experience any of it in real time. We also don’t get to see what happened when they parted ways. What were the circumstances of them saying goodbye? What were they each feeling? We’ll never know. As soon as the story picks up again, we learn that Mel is pregnant. She hasn’t told Jones about the baby and doesn’t intend to. Jones has been missing Mel all this time. He hasn’t been with another woman since then, despite having lots of offers, because she’s the only one he wants. He’s just been transferred to Virginia, which is much closer to Mel’s hometown in Massachusetts, so he calls her up. He leaves a message saying that he’s been thinking about her a lot and even knowing that “she said what she said” when they parted, he wants to come see her for the weekend. What did Mel say when they parted? Well, we never really find out the specifics, but basically she told him not to call or write to her. That she wanted a clean break after their affair ended. Jones was upset by this, but she felt it was for the best and stands by her decision. And this is part of why Mel ruins the book for me. She was so cold towards Jones that it made me hate her. Time and time again he put his heart out there and every time she stomped all over it. Mel gets Jones’s message and her sister (who is awesome, btw. Very supportive and loving) is shocked to learn that Mel never told Jones about the baby. Mel then calls Jones back and leaves him a message saying that she hasn’t changed her mind. She doesn’t want to see him and to please not call again. Jones is hurt by this but decides to go see her anyway. There’s a side story going on throughout the book about a 12-year-old boy named Andy. He’s a foster kid who’s been placed with Mel’s neighbors and he’s troubled. He tries to keep people at arms-length by being nasty and abrasive. He’s also getting picked on by some much older boys. Mel is driving through town and sees Andy being beat up so she stops and rushes over. She’s been having a very rough pregnancy filled with lots of dizziness and frequent vomiting, so running isn’t great for her. The other boys run off and Mel tries to talk to Andy. He’s resistant, as usual, but they almost make a breakthrough until Andy pulls back and runs off again. Mel tries to chase him and asks for someone to stop him, but then she faints. Jones is there on the street corner and snags Andy as he runs past. Only when he tries to march Andy back does he realize that the pregnant woman who was after him is actually Mel. Jones is very confused and immediately suspects that the baby is his, but he’s not sure. He rushes her to the hospital and there’s lots of confusion. Jones keeps asking for the baby’s due date and Mel tries not to give it to him, but then her sister, who is a nurse at the hospital, rushes in and knows right away who Jones is, so she tells him. When Jones takes Mel home after the hospital she basically tells him not to let the door hit him on the way out. She says straight out that she doesn’t want or need Jones, and neither will their baby. That she’s got enough money saved up to be able to stay home with the baby for four years before she’d have to go back to work (how???), and that her mother has already set up a trust fund for the baby to take care of college. So there’s nothing Jones can bring to the equation and she doesn’t want him involved. Jones leaves after this, but comes back the next day in his dress uniform. He asks Mel to marry him, and she harshly rejects him. And that’s pretty much what happens for the rest of the book. Jones tries over and over to get Mel to agree to marry him and she tells him to get lost. He even sets up a tent in her backyard and stays there for weeks hoping for any crumbs of affection she might deign to give him. And no matter how many times she harshly rejects him, and no matter how much that hurts him, he still keeps coming back. He never gets mad at her or tries to push her faster than she’ll allow. It was brutal to read, honestly. Mel’s objections to being with Jones are that they don’t really know each other. A sex-filled fling after an adrenaline-fueled nightmare isn’t the same as an actual relationship. They’ll be miserable together if they get married just for the baby. And that Jones will hardly be there anyway, because he’s not going to leave the SEALs and that means he’ll constantly be away on dangerous missions. Mel doesn’t want a lifetime of being alone and worried that this time he might not come back. She wants to marry a nice, normal guy. There’s one scene where Mel has a midnight craving for food and Jones and she go to the local convenience store. Only when they get inside, Jones realizes the two guys at the counter are robbing the place, so he attacks them. In the ensuing struggle, Jones yells for Mel to get outside, away from the danger, but she just stupidly stands there frozen in fear that Jones will be hurt. Afterward he yells at her, demanding to know why she didn’t “follow orders” and get her and their baby to safety. She responds by yelling back at him that she’s not one of his soldiers, she doesn’t “follow orders.” After that she re-erects the wall between them. Jones’s inner monolog tells us that his reaction had been born out of the absolute terror he’d felt at her being in danger. It was so bad that he’d actually had to excuse himself in the middle of giving his statement to the cops so he could go off and vomit. He, a Navy SEAL who had been in dozens of dangerous situations and never even flinched, had been scared, for her. I thought that this scene was included so that Jones could have an epiphany about what it would be like for Mel to be married to him. That the fear he’d felt at her being in danger that day would be what Mel would feel every single time he went on a mission….but it’s not. Absolutely nothing comes of this encounter, other than that Mel pulls away again. What a missed opportunity. Jones also starts spending some time with Andy. They work out together and Jones agrees to teach Andy how to fight, under the condition that he only uses it to defend himself, not to start fights. It seems to be having a positive effect on Andy and he’s opening up. He also starts using Mel’s sister’s computer to do research and he and the sister start bonding. Then the police show up one day and say that a local house was vandalized and a witness saw Andy in the area. Andy’s fingerprints are also all over the house. Andy says he didn’t do it, but Jones doesn’t believe him, because of the fingerprints. Andy is very hurt that no one trusts him. Soon after that, Andy turns up missing and they find his clothes next to the Quarry swimming hole. It’s a place Andy and Jones had gone together a few times. Jones to keep his SEAL skills up to scratch and Andy so that he could gains some exposure to what it would be like if he went into the military. Everyone suspects Andy drown and Jones feels responsible. He calls in Harvard and together they dive into the very deep shaft, looking to recover the body. This incident has a profound effect on Jones. He’d been fighting to marry Mel so that his child would know that he had a father who cared about him. Thinking that even a father who was away a lot would be better than none at all. But this thing with Andy makes Jones feel like he doesn’t have what it takes to be a father. Soon Mel realizes that Andy had been using the computer to look up the army base where he’s bio-dad was stationed and they think that’s where he really is. Mel and Jones race up there and find Andy at the bus station, completely dejected. He’d seen his father, but the man only spent five minutes with him and kept calling him by the wrong name. Andy then says that he doesn’t know why Jones wants to marry Mel anyway, when he’ll never be around, just like Andy’s dad. That the man Mel works for has the hots for her and would marry her in a second, then he’d actually be around for both Mel and the baby. This also hits home for Jones and he realizes that Mel and the baby probably will be better off without him. Next day is Mel’s first Lamaze class. Her sister was going to go, but now she’s attending a meeting with social services, to try to determine Andy’s fate. The sister wants to adopt Andy. So Jones goes with Mel and she’s supposed to be relaxing against him during the session but instead she’s very tense. Mel’s thinking about how she’s now fallen in love with Jones and wants to give their relationship a try after all. But Jones sees it as another sign that he should just go. She’s been consistent in her rejection of him all along and the recent events with Andy have finally beaten him down to the point where he’s ready to give up. He tells Mel that he’s going to give her what she wants. Earlier in the book she’d offered him a “compromise” where he was allowed visitation rights, now Jones wants to accept that deal. And Mel doesn’t say anything about her recent decision that she loves him. She just agrees. They go back to her house and have sex, which didn’t really make sense for where their relationship stands, and then Jones leaves the next day. We don’t see him leaving, but we’re told in exposition after the fact that Mel barely even said goodbye to him. That she and her sister had been rushing around cleaning the house because Social Services was coming over to inspect it as part of considering her sister’s request to adopt Andy. So Mel let the man that she supposedly loves and just had sex with, the father of her baby, just walk away with barely a “drive safe” on his way out the door. I seriously hate this woman. Back at his base, Jones is in a bad way. He attacks one of his teammates when they make a crack about Mel. Harvard talks to Jones and basically convinces him to give things another shot. But then they’re sent out on a mission so he’s gone for weeks. In the meantime, Mel wakes up to blood all over her sheets. She’s had a partial placental abruption and is hemorrhaging. They get her to the hospital and stop the bleeding, but Mel refuses to have the baby delivered by C-section. There are still 2 weeks to go before the baby’s full term, and they’re not currently in danger, so she sees no reason to rush it. Except that if she starts hemorrhaging again, they might not be able to stop it and she might bleed to death. Jones comes back from his mission to a stack of messages. One is from Mel, saying that she loves him, the rest are from her sister begging him to come back and convince Mel to deliver the baby. She believes that the real reason Mel is holding off is because she promised that Jones could be there for the delivery. Jones goes back and tells her to have the C-section. He also says that he still wants to marry her. He knows he’s asking a lot. She’ll have to move all over the world as he gets stationed various places, but he loves her and she loves him. Mel agrees. The epilogue is them together on a base somewhere, their son now months old and Mel tells us that there’s nowhere else she’d want to be. It all felt very abrupt and unfounded. None of the issues Mel had been bringing up the whole book had been resolved, she just suddenly became okay with it all. Jones never considered leaving the SEALs and he really IS gone more than he’s at home. But everyone’s just fine with it now? And what was with Mel letting him leave without telling him she was in love with him? It’s not like she wanted to tell him but something held her back, or physically prevented her from doing it. She was just too busy cleaning the house?? Oh be still my heart. I’m feeling totally bowled over with Mel’s affection for Jones here… (hide spoiler)] All in all, it just wasn’t a very satisfying read. Mel treated Jones like dirt throughout the whole book and only changed her mind at the very, very end when the magical ILYs were exchanged. Jones took so much abuse from her and just kept coming back for more. And none of their legitimate issues ever got resolved, they just magically became okay with them now. Lame ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Nov 28, 2021
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Nov 28, 2021
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0373742487
| 9780373742486
| 0373742487
| 4.10
| 240
| Jul 01, 2013
| Jul 01, 2013
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it was ok
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Unfortunately, I wasn’t feeling this book. (view spoiler)[ The backstory is that Melissa, Cooper and Scott were all best friends through childhood and Unfortunately, I wasn’t feeling this book. (view spoiler)[ The backstory is that Melissa, Cooper and Scott were all best friends through childhood and into their 20s. Mel had a crush on Coop for years but he only saw her as a friend. So at 16 she apparently decided to just shift her attention to Scott instead. At almost the exact same time Mel and Scott started dating, Coop realized that he was actually in love with her. He couldn’t make a move, though, because she was dating his best friend. So, in his own words, he just sat back and bided his time. High School romances rarely work out, so he figured they’d break up at some point. But they never did break up, they got married. And then Coop ended up being the guy they both went to with any issues in their marriage. So he was pretty solidly friend-zoned at this point, but I couldn’t really feel sorry for him because of how creepy this all felt. How could he keep being friends with them both and acting as a confidant for both about their marital troubles when he’s just sitting there like a vulture hoping their marriage will fail so he could swoop in? Then one day Coop sees Scott coming out of a motel and kissing some strange girl. He confronts Scott for cheating and Scott laughs and says “So what? Did you really expect me to only sleep with one woman for the rest of my life?” But then, despite apparently being so unconcerned with the fact that he’s been caught cheating on his wife, he still threatens Coop into staying quiet. He says that he knows Coop’s been in love with Mel all these years and that he’ll tell her that Coop is lying in order to try to break up their marriage. Coop is ashamed that he’s been caught coveting another man’s wife and he’s afraid that Mel will, indeed, believe Scott and then Coop will lose any chance of a future relationship with her. So he decides to keep quiet and just hope Mel finds out some other way and then he’ll get to be her shoulder to cry on while he helps her pick up the pieces. Yikes. For six months he sat back and allowed Mel to keep sleeping with a guy who was also banging random chicks at a cheap motel. What if Scott had given her an STD? For heaven’s sake, she could have gotten HIV, or HPV which can lead to cervical cancer. Coop was literally risking her life by keeping quiet about this! And what makes it even worse, is that Coop KNEW Mel was trying to get pregnant while all this was going on. Which if she’d succeeded, would have dumped an innocent child into this mess. And Coop chooses to risk all this because he wants to make sure HE still has a chance with her? Dude, that’s not love. That’s self-serving manipulation. But Mel eventually did find out Scott was cheating and that Coop had known all along. We never find out exactly how this went down. We don’t see any flashbacks or even get any internal monolog musings about the events. Which robs us of the necessary drama and backstory that we need. Did Mel walk in on Scott? Did he confess? How did she find out about Coop’s involvement? Did she confront Coop about it at the time? If so, what did he say? Your guess is as good as mine. The book begins three years after this drama. Mel still hates Coop for breaking her trust and has avoided him all this time. We’re also told that Mel had to deal with being the subject of their very small town’s gossip and it’s left her permanently scarred. She NEVER wants to be the subject of town gossip, or get married again. In the time since the divorce, Mel has started her own business as a florist, and that’s pretty much all she’s been doing. She hasn’t done any dating, hasn’t gotten over her hurt and anger at Scott and Coop. And she apparently hasn’t made any new friends either, because all throughout the book when she’s in situations where most people would call their best girlfriend for a chat, she instead just has to sit alone and think on things herself. It’s weird for her to be so friendless in this close-knit small town but that’s the story we’re given. Coop comes into her flower shop to buy an apology bouquet (for his mom). Mel acidly asks “what woman did you do wrong now?” showing just how bitter she still is three years on. She’s also VERY conscious of the fact that her assistant is in the shop and might gossip about her and Coop speaking so she sends the woman out to get coffee. Eventually Mel sort of agrees that it’s time they buried the hatchet and Coop leaves, but she firmly intends to continue avoiding him. Plot-conveniently there’s a family that lost their home in a fire and the townspeople are all pitching in to build them a new one. Mel has signed up to volunteer and wouldn’t you know it, Coop’s there too. They end up having to spend several hours working together and Mel starts to notice how nicely Coop fills out his clothes, but afterward makes sure to avoid him again. Coop ends up catching her at the volunteer house another time and says that she’s not very good at the whole “bury the hatchet” thing since she’s still treating him like a leper. They spend some more time together and are on somewhat better terms afterward. During all this we’re also told that Mel has been undergoing artificial insemination treatments because she wants to have a baby, but doesn’t want a husband. I found it odd that Mel was unconcerned about all the gossip this would cause when everywhere else in the book she’s hyper worried about it but, whatever. When the house is finished there’s a big party. Mel gets her period while there and has a breakdown because it means the latest round of insemination didn’t take and she’d gotten her hopes up. Coop sees her rushing out of the party and chases after her. She won’t tell him what’s wrong, so he just insists on driving her home. She allows him to do this, but is worried about the gossip it’ll create. Once at her house, he walks her up to the door but then decides that now, when she’s obviously an emotionally vulnerable wreck, is the perfect time to kiss her. That’s pretty slimy of him. Mel’s surprised at first, then responds enthusiastically, then pushes him away and yells at him. Not for taking advantage of her when she was so upset, but for kissing her under the porch light, which makes them visible to the gossipy neighbors. Coop gets kind of pissed that she’s been blowing hot and cold and asks what’s going on. So she finally explains that she was trying to get pregnant via IVF and he is stunned. He doesn’t judge her though and she feels better after talking it out with her good friend Coop. She’d really missed having him to always unburden herself to. She drives him home afterward. It’s the first time she’s been on his family’s ranch in three years and she’s stunned at how rich they are. She comments several times in her inner monolog that she’d known they were doing well, but not THIS well. It’s kind of sordid that her focus is on Coop’s wealth, rather than on the nostalgia of being in a place filled with happy childhood memories. The next day she’s feeling restless and wants to go someplace “familiar” so she goes to his ranch since she doesn’t have any other friends. It really came across like she was using him. The fact that he’d kissed her the night before said clearly that he was interested in more than friendship from her, but she just wants to use him as a balm for her mood. And if she’d somehow missed the whole kiss thing, once she’s at his ranch the subject comes up and he asks if she’s interested in him that way. She says she’s not interested in anyone that way. Not now, not ever. This hurts Coop’s feelings but he soldiers on. They go for a walk around his ranch and he tells her that he wants to father her baby. That he still feels bad for breaking her trust three years ago so he sees this as a way of making amends. He swears the baby will be hers alone, he won’t try to interfere or demand visitation, etc. She’s shocked and a little upset that he’s indicating this is a “now we’re square” kind of offer, but she also considers it because she knows they’ll make beautiful babies together. However, the fact that Coop wants to conceive this baby in the “traditional way” gives her pause. In the end, he tells her to think about it and give her answer in a few days. A few days later they go for a horseback ride. They stop by a creek and Coop initiates a kiss that gets pretty hot and heavy. He pulls away though and says that he knows she’s going to reject his offer to father the baby. I was actually glad this was her decision because all the reasons she gives are right. There was absolutely no way this would work out and it was refreshing to see a romance novel heroine making the smart decision for a change. Coop is upset and accuses Mel of thinking he’s not good enough to father her child. That she’d take some random guy over him. That she’ll never forgive him for his past mistakes. Then he tells her the truth about why he hadn’t clued her in about Scott’s infidelity. He straight up admits that he’d been in love with her and still is. She barely reacts to this information, instead focusing on chiding Coop for thinking that she would have believed Scott’s excuses over Coop’s truth. Saying that Coop must not have thought very much of her friendship or judgement. In the end, they decide to try dating. After the first date when Coop drops her off at her house he tries to get her to invite him inside but she tells him no and he eventually backs off. After two weeks of off-page dating, things are going well. They’ve allegedly regained that old comfortable way of laughing with each other, and Mel is very attracted to Coop. Then one day she arrives at their date and sees him interacting with a friend’s toddler. Seeing him be so tender and fatherly apparently makes her realize she’s in love with him. But instead of throwing herself into his arms, she runs away and has a breakdown in her house. Apparently all these FEELINGS are just so overwhelming that she needs to have a good cry for several days in order to sort through them. So she texts Coop to say she’s sick. He shows up with chicken soup and can tell that she’s lying about being sick and has instead been crying. The days of avoidance that follow seem to confirm to Coop that something has changed and she’s pulling away from him. He’s tired of being jerked around. He’d laid his soul bare, taken things slow like she wanted, been a friend to her whenever she needed one, and all she’s done is take what she wanted from him while denying him what he wanted. So he goes to her house to confront her. She lets him in but plot-conveniently needs to run into the other room for a minute so he starts flipping through her mail on the table. He finds an appointment card from the fertility clinic and thinks she’s gone back for another round of insemination. So the minute she walks back in the room he jumps all over her. He says he can’t believe she’d do this to him after they started dating. That she had to know he wouldn’t be able to tolerate the sight of her carrying another man’s child. How could she make a decision like this without even discussing it with him first? Instead of just explaining what’s going on, Mel gets all righteously indignant that he doesn’t trust her and refuses to tell him what the appointment is really about. She also won’t tell him why she blew off their date and lied about it. So he leaves, saying that they’re through. He deserves better than her. Mel takes several more days to think about her feelings before finally deciding that she’s going to have to make the first move if she wants him back. So she goes to his house and bizarrely starts the conversation by talking about how she’s always viewed him as such a great friend. This of course just makes it seem like she just misses her good old pal Coop who always listened to her woes. Eventually she gets around to explaining that once she saw him with that kid, it made her realize she loved him. And that the clinic appointment was to check that she didn’t have any fertility issues (since the IVF failed so many times) to ensure that they could they a family. Mel expects Coop to more or less jump for joy after this. After all, he said he was in love with her all this time and now she’s just said she loves him back, what more could he want, right? Well turns out her speech about what a good friend he is and the fact that her sudden realization that she loved him was wrapped up in seeing that he’d make a good father, doesn’t exactly reassure him that she loves him for him. He thinks she just wants a baby and is saying whatever it takes to make that happen. They continue on, having a rather awkward conversation with her trying to convince him that no, she really does love him, before he eventually gives in. It seems to be against his better judgement since, truthfully, he’s still worried that she has ulterior motives for being with him. And honestly, I probably would too, if I was him. Her ILY speech contained almost nothing that indicated that she really loved him, other than the words themselves. She didn’t give examples of the thousands of little things about him that made her love him. There wasn’t even any indication that she desired him physically. Even the ILY itself was couched between “you’re such a good friend” and “you’d be such a great father” talk. Not to mention that it seemed pretty off that it had taken her several days to get around to coming after him. It made it seem like she’d needed the time to come up with a good story to tell him. Or like she’d been expecting him to come crawling back to her like always so she’d waited a while. And, though Coop doesn’t know this, as soon as he’d let her into his house she’d been temporarily dumbstruck by how big and expensively decorated it was and she thinks again about how his ranch must be doing VERY well indeed. It just all came together to make it seem like she didn’t really love him. She loved what he could give her. A family, wealth, that good old shoulder to cry on, a rescue whenever she was in trouble, etc. But this is the story we’re given. We pick things up a few months later. Coop and Mel have been dating and sleeping together for a few months. They’ve been using protection, at her insistence, so that Coop can feel reassured that it’s truly him she’s after, not his sperm. But I couldn’t help thinking that this didn’t really prove anything. If she’d been calculating and mercenary enough to tell him she loved him for ulterior motives, surely she’d have also been smart enough to bide her time on the baby thing. But we’re not supposed to think about that. The story wraps up with Coop proposing to her. HEA. (hide spoiler)] All in all, I didn’t end up liking either character. Both of them were disgusting, self-involved and self-serving jerks at various times. Coop was a beta hero and ended up feeling pretty pathetic. Mel started out sympathetic but ended up a manipulative succubus. Just not a great read. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Jan 09, 2020
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Jan 10, 2020
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Mass Market Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0515128015
| 9780515128017
| 0515128015
| 3.90
| 6,071
| Jun 01, 2000
| Jun 01, 2000
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did not like it
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Eesh. I started out really liking this book and thinking it was way better than the second one in the series, Dawn in Eclipse Bay, which I read first.
Eesh. I started out really liking this book and thinking it was way better than the second one in the series, Dawn in Eclipse Bay, which I read first. But things just kept going downhill until I was speed-skimming through the ending just to be done. (view spoiler)[ The biggest problem with this book is the heroine. She’s an annoying, prissy, judgmental, lecturing, hypocritical PRUDE who blows hot and cold with the hero, jerking him around like a plaything. There was seriously nothing likeable about her and I didn’t understand why the hero was such a lovesick puppy dog over her. Their romance wavered back and forth between boring, confusing and pathetic and I didn’t care one bit whether they got together in the end. And the constant, CONSTANT, stating and restating of the family names was sooooo annoying. Every single scene, every single conversation, everything the hero and heroine did was linked back to their family. “I’m a Harte/Madison, everyone knows we always/never…” JAK seriously tried to make the family names their entire identity. Which was really lame because there was nothing especially interesting about either family. The “feud” that was touted on the back of the book was completely nonexistent. Neither family seemed to care about the other at all, let alone be “feuding” with them. Okay, the story starts off great. Hannah Harte is on a date with a guy named Perry. On paper he’s an appropriate date for her illustrious rich self since he’s from a good family and is going to college, etc. etc. But in person he turns out to be a sexual predator who tries to force himself on the 20-year-old Hannah when she won’t put out on their date. He ends up leaving her stranded on an isolated road more than a half hour’s walk from her house. Lucky for her, Rafe was also kicked out of the car and abandoned by his own date when he told her he wasn’t interested in being one of the legion of men she was sleeping around with. Rafe is the town bad boy. One of those ne’er-do-well Madisons who will never amount to anything. He rides a motorcycle and hangs out at the local adult books store and everyone is sure it’s only a matter of time before he winds up in jail. But Rafe is a perfect gentleman to Hannah and just makes sure she gets home safely. As they walk, they chat about their respective love lives and futures. Hannah reveals that she’s got a long list of requirements for her Mr. Right and rattles off about a dozen things. Then she natters on about her big plans for the future. Rafe, on the other hand, says that his only career goal is to not end up in prison. This scene was poignant and sad because you really felt for Rafe. It was clear from what he said that dealing with the town’s negative opinion of him all his life had hurt. That he’d been told so often that he’d never amount to anything and didn’t deserve anything good, that he kind of believed it. It was obvious that he liked Hannah on a level deeper than just superficial attraction. It was like he thought of her as a pure, virgin princess while he was the dirty peasant not worth of being with her. And when she rattled off her list of Mr. Right requirements, it just depressed him because he knew he’d never meet her standards. Unfortunately, as much as I felt for Rafe in this scene, it doesn’t actually stand up once you read the rest of the book because, as I said, the supposed feud and the town’s alleged negative opinions of the Madisons are bunk. The only real scandal in the Madisons’ past was that Rafe’s grandfather had been married and divorced 4 times. I’m not seeing what’s so allegedly sinister about that. It’s not like anyone in Rafe’s family was a criminal. So…where’s the supposed negativity the town feels towards the Madisons coming from? I didn’t get it. We’re TOLD that the town has always treated Rafe as if he’s a bad seed, but we’re never really shown any examples of that or justifications for why the town would behave that way. And seriously, if things were all THAT bad for the Madisons in Eclipse Bay, why the heck didn’t the grandfather move him and the boys away? So this “Poor Rafe’s been unjustly maligned his whole life” thing that stirred up my sympathies in the beginning of the book felt really unjustified by the time I got to the end, which sort of ruins this scene for me. Honestly, the only negativity I saw directed toward him could just as easily been the result of him deliberately cultivating his bad boy, rebel without a cause image. But no, JAK constantly tries to bash us over the head with empty, unsupported exposition insisting that the whole town is against Rafe because he’s a Madison. During their walk Hannah lectures Rafe on how he should have more ambitions for himself than just staying out of jail. She never says anything nice to Rafe during this unsolicited sermon, she just says that it’s stupid for him to not plan to go to college or whatever and says that he should “get a life.” If she’d actually told Rafe that she thought he was better than his reputation. That she saw the smart, sensitive guy underneath and believed in him, that would have been so much better and would have had a much more profoundly positive impact on him. Instead she comes off as a snobby know-it-all who’s schooling the dumb-dumb on life. The next morning, Hannah wakes up to the sounds of her parents arguing with the town sheriff. Rafe’s ex-girlfriend’s body was found that morning and Rafe is their number one suspect. Hannah does the right thing and vouches for the fact that Rafe was with her during the murder. And that was apparently the end of things because the chapter cuts out here and we pick up 8 years later. We’re told that in the aftermath of the murder, life was tough for Hannah because the gossip about her and Rafe went through the town like wildfire. Some people still assumed that Rafe had killed the ex-girlfriend and that he’d then seduced Hannah as an alibi. Others just occupied themselves with speculating that Rafe and Hannah had sex on the beach that night. But again, this all felt very hollow in terms of character and plot development because Hannah is totally fine. She weathered the storm of the town’s gossip and came out the other side being exactly the same person she’d been beforehand. This could have been a chance for her to grow and see how tough life had been for Rafe, growing up with everyone in town just waiting to pounce on any infraction and say “I always knew he was no good,” but no, Hannah doesn’t have that epiphany. No emotional growth on her part at all. We pick up the story with Hannah learning that her aunt - who always liked Rafe and frequently talked about how romantic it would be for Rafe and Hannah to end up together a la Romeo and Juliet - has died and left a huge mansion to both of them. Neither one can use 50% of a house and both have a dream of turning it into a business, Rafe a restaurant and Hannah an inn, so neither wants to sell out. Underneath Rafe’s restaurant dreams, however, is his still-strong desire to have Hannah. He wants to use this house situation as a way of getting close to her. In the time since they last met, he’s become rich through day-trading, been married and divorced, and become a master-level chef. Hannah, meanwhile, has been running a successful wedding planner business and been engaged but was ultimately dumped shortly before the wedding (which makes her ex-fiancé the smartest one in the book). The rest of the plot is pretty boring, especially on the romance front. Rafe keeps trying to put the moves on Hannah but she seems completely immune to him. She’s uptight and prim most of the time, but sometimes she turns into this sex-crazed wild woman for a few seconds only to immediately switch back to being an ice queen. Early in the book Rafe kisses her and they start making out. She’s super into it but then gets distracted by her dog and calls a halt to things. This had more to do with JAK’s tired old romance formula than anything the characters were feeling. Rule #1 is that the happy couple cannot have sex the first time they make out. Any contrived reason will do to break up the moment, even a dog walking by. So Hannah stops the make-out session and then spends the next few chapters being completely indifferent to Rafe. Then Perry shows up. Rafe had spent the night at Hannah’s house (on the couch) for various contrived reasons and Perry arrives at 9:00 in the morning so most people would assume Hannah and Rafe were in a relationship. But Perry is one of those pompous jerks who is completely convinced of his superiority in all things so he not only dismisses Rafe as a potential rival for Hannah’s affections, he also confidently invites her to come to a political function the next day. Hannah asks a few questions and then accepts the invitation without cluing the readers in on why. Perry then arrogantly says that he’ll be far too busy to pick her up but he’s sure she can find her way on her own. Rafe is a experiencing a rather sad mixture of disappointment, anger and low self-esteem. He thinks Perry is a jerk (which is kind of understating it for an attempted rapist) but sees Hannah’s acceptance of Perry’s invitation as a sign that she’s still into men who meet her list of qualities, which Rafe himself obviously doesn’t meet and never will. Coming on the heels of her rejection of him during their make-out session, he’s not feeling very confident. Hannah basically orders Rafe to go to the party with her as her date. When Rafe says that he thinks Perry is under the impression that she’s going to be his date, she scoffs and says that Perry couldn’t even be bothered to pick her up. At the party we come in on Rafe standing on the sidelines watching Hannah and Perry dance together. Perry seems disgruntled, which makes Rafe feel a bit better about the situation. He chats amiably with Jed, the owner of the local paper and someone Rafe knew passingly in the old days. Eventually a dot-com billionaire comes on the scene and we find out that Hannah knows him because she organized his wedding. A friend of Hannah’s has been trying to get a job at the institute Perry works for but Perry has been blocking him. So Hannah uses her relationship with the billionaire to force Perry to stop blocking her friend. That’s why she agreed to come to this event. Perry corners her and is super-pissed about the whole thing. Things devolve as the incident 8 years ago is brought up and Hannah accuses him of attempted rape while Perry says she’s a c*ck teasing prude who’s too repressed to behave like a normal woman. He ends up grabbing her and finally Rafe, who’d been watching from the shadows, steps in to tell Perry to keep his hands to himself or else. Perry threatens to have Rafe arrested if he lays a hand on him and Hannah pulls Rafe away before things get violent. It was all kind of disappointing. In the car on the ride home Hannah has come down from the temporary high she felt at getting one over on Perry and now she’s worried that by making him so angry, he’ll make her friend’s life a living hell at the institute…which he probably will. And Rafe isn’t much better in his inner monologue thoughts since he’s not planning some uber-alpha way of ensuring that his woman’s attempted rapist is brought to heel. Lame. They go back to the mansion and one thing leads to another. Suddenly Hannah and Rafe are so hot for each other that they can hardly make it up the stairs to the bedroom. They have a typical JAK sex scene where the woman is taken care of beforehand and the man lasts 5 seconds after penetration. A few hours later, Hannah wakes up as the ice queen again. She completely freaks out about them having slept together. Suddenly she’s worried that Rafe is playing her, trying to work some kind of angle to get the mansion all to himself. He sees her freaking out and asks what’s gone wrong, then when she asks if he’s playing her, he turns it around on her. He asks if she even planned to call him in the morning or if she was just using him, first to stick it to Perry by taking him as a date, and then as a convenient bed partner. She ends up running from the house like a ninny. The next morning she waits until 10:00 to call him so she won’t seem so eager. Rafe answers sounding distracted but when he realizes it’s her, he calls her honey and says that he’s a little busy overseeing the local handy men. She freaks out that he’s having work done on the mansion without her consent and goes flying over to scream at him, saying that she KNEW last night had been all about the house for him. He says that they both want to turn the mansion into a business, so it doesn’t hurt anything to have the wiring and such inspected. Then Rafe asks if she wants to go partners on the business venture. He’ll run the restaurant and she’ll run the inn. Hannah basically spits on this idea and again accuses him of sleeping with her for ulterior motives. She ends up stomping off, but before she leaves, the chatty workmen mention that they once did a job at Rafe’s dead ex-girlfriend’s house and found a secret stash of women’s underwear and shoes that were in a man’s size. There were also a bunch of video tapes, though they don’t know what was on them. This gets Hannah and Rafe thinking that the ex-girlfriend might have been murdered by someone she was trying to blackmail so they start investigating. They end up going to see the porn shop owner, figuring that if anyone knew about a local with these kinds of tendencies, it would be him. Hannah is a total stuck-up prude about this whole storyline. She makes it clear that any man who enjoys cross-dressing is a sexual deviant and that anyone who frequents a porn shop is a pathetic degenerate. She can barely even bring herself to be civil to the shop owner and very much looks down on Rafe for having spent some of his youth in the store. I really hated Hannah and her sanctimonious moralizing in this scene, especially since it came right on the heels of her having sex with Rafe. It just really demonstrated that she didn’t think he was good enough for her. They part ways with their relationship somewhat strained. Then Hannah goes home and finds her dog missing. She follows the sound of his barking and ends up finding him on a rocky outcropping on the beach, locked in a cage and in the path of the incoming tide. Someone had deliberately left him to drown. She rescues him, but then the dog alerts her to the fact that someone is lurking in the shadowy night so she panics and runs to a convenient cave she knew from her childhood. She emerges from the other side to find Rafe frantically calling for her and she runs straight into his arms. Rafe spends another night on the couch for her protection. The next day, they have Rafe’s grandfather over for dinner because Hannah had pushed Rafe to invite him to repair the two men’s strained relationship. As Rafe is preparing the food, he’s suddenly overcome with emotion about Hannah’s brush with death the night before. He recants to the readers how when he first arrived at her house to find her car in the driveway but her not answering the door, he’d thought that “the worst had happened” and she was upstairs having sex with another man. Then when he’d realized the dog wasn’t barking and it was an odd time for a walk, he’d become concerned. Now he’s come to the conclusion that the dog may not have been the villain’s ultimate target. If Hannah had arrived home later, the tide would have been higher and rescuing the dog would have been much more dangerous. The idea of Hannah dying practically brings Rafe to his knees. Then he carries the hors d’oeurves in to Hannah and his grandfather he hears them talking. The grandfather is assuring Hannah that Rafe will “do right by her.” When Hannah asks what he means, he says that he’ll see to it that Rafe offers to marry her because “shacking up” with a woman like her just isn’t done. He goes on to say that Rafe just has a phobia of marriage because he’s been divorced. Things go downhill from there as Hannah doesn’t say a single thing to even hint that she feels anything romantic for Rafe, or that she thinks he’s a good person in general, and instead just gets haughty about the grandfather’s use of the term, “shacking up.” Eventually the grandfather mentions that he’d always known that Rafe didn’t kill the ex-girlfriend. Rafe has been standing frozen in the doorway the whole time they’ve been discussing him and gets a bit emotional over this declaration. Apparently he was never sure if his grandfather believed him. Moving on, Rafe eventually convinces Hannah to move into the mansion with him for her protection but she makes a big stink about insisting that she have her own bedroom because they are NOT shacking up. They also find out that it’s the town politician who wore the ladies underwear in the ex-girlfriend’s house. But the politician and all the movers and shakers in town had been at a function at the institute the night of the murder so it can’t have been him that killed her. Rafe and Hannah have sex again and again Hannah acts like an ice queen afterwards. There’s a bit of an argument where Hannah says that he’d never have been with her when they were younger because she wasn’t his type. He denies it and say he was desperate for her back then but knew he didn’t meet her stupid list of requirements. She says that’s not true, that she’d had a crush on him, all the girls in town had because he was so handsome and dangerous with his motorcycle and leather jacket. He says that it’s not exactly a compliment that everyone thought of him as the kind of guy they’d like to have a dirty little affair with but never bring home to their family. A bit later they’re driving in the car and stop for gas. A bunch of the local people happen by and all start making comments about how Rafe and Hannah are “shacking up.” Hannah goes ballistic and screams at all of them like a crazy woman. Insisting that she and Rafe are merely cohabitating in the mansion because they both own half, they are NOT in a relationship. Things take a weird turn when Rafe says that they ARE in a relationship and she says he’s never given any indication that he wanted a future with her. He then inexplicably says that he wants to marry her, which she takes offense to because she doesn’t think it’s a real or appropriate proposal. Arizona Snow makes her usual crazy appearance to provide a log of all the people who were at the institute the night of the murder and who left early. They eventually figure out that the villain is Jed, the owner of the paper. Rafe goes to his house to confront him and finds that he’s packed up and left in a hurry. Back with Hannah, they’re walking along the beach when the dog starts barking and alerts them to the fact that the mansion is on fire. They get back in time to see Jed making a run for it. Hannah calls 9-1-1 while Rafe tackles Jed. He’s led away by the cops saying that he had “everything set” and had been about to make his move but then they’d ruined everything by coming back to town. We don’t really get an explanation for why he’d waited 8 years to make whatever move he’d been planning but who really cares. Rafe and Hannah then declare their love for each other even though Hannah hasn’t demonstrated a single ounce of affection for him and he should be running as far and as fast as he can away from her shrill, hypocritical moralizing. (hide spoiler)] All in all by the end I pretty much hated this book. The heroine was a nasty prude and the hero was a weak beta who trailed after her lapping up whatever crumbs of affection she deigned to give him. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
|
not set
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Mar 06, 2019
|
Mar 07, 2019
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Mass Market Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0345519477
| 9780345519474
| 0345519477
| 3.97
| 36,138
| Aug 30, 2011
| Aug 30, 2011
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it was ok
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This is a book that started off badly and only got marginally better by the end. Enough to raise it up to 2 stars from the 1 it had been for the first
This is a book that started off badly and only got marginally better by the end. Enough to raise it up to 2 stars from the 1 it had been for the first 2/3 of the book, but that's all. It just wasn't that enjoyable to read. The heroine was annoying and TSTL, the hero was a total "YOU WILL OBEY ME BECAUSE I'VE GOT A PENIS" jerk and I didn't believe their romance at all. And on top of that, a bunch of side plots were introduced seconds before they became relevant and then got immediately resolved, which makes them feel like nothing but filler. The book as a whole lacks proper pacing, with events happening much too quickly to be believed or to give them proper weight in the story. And the ending was a big, fat unbelievable and unsatisfying mess. (view spoiler)[ Ok so we start off with the heroine, Mairin, hiding out in a convent. She's apparently the illegitimate daughter of the late king and literally worth her weight in gold to whomever marries her. She's got a huge dowry and her first born child will inherit this apparently really great and important property in Scotland. It's never really explained just why this property is so highly sought after so it felt like just a meaningless MacGuffin in these proceedings. Some men burst into the abbey and start torturing the Mother Superior to find out where Mairin is. The old nun is made of stern stuff and doesn't crack under torture but Mairin can't stand by and watch so she reveals herself. The men then toss up her skirts to find the brand on her leg that marks her as the king's heir and then whisk her away to the land of a man named Cameron. On the way there an 8-year-old boy happens upon them and tries to steal one of their horses. Mairin goes all mama-tiger and protects the boy when her captors would have hurt and possibly killed him. When they arrive at Cameron's place, he announces his intent to marry her in order to gain her riches. The priest, however, needs to hear Mairin consent so when she refuses, Cameron beats her senseless, which apparently the priest had no problem with. Back up in her room, the boy, whose name is Crispin, vows that if they can escape, his father will protect Mairin. Then some of Cameron's servants help them escape, at great personal risk. They make their way toward Crispin's home and soon run into his uncle. Crispin's father, Ewan, has had the whole clan out looking for his missing son. The uncle takes them home and Ewan is immediately suspicious of Mairin because she won't give her name or any information about why she was with Cameron, and on top of that, she's wearing the colors of Cameron's clan (which he forced her to wear) and Cameron is Ewan's arch nemesis. Crispin insists that his dad protect Mairin and he reluctantly agrees but still goes all Lord of the Manor about everything. He doesn't seem to give Mairin any thanks or benefit of the doubt because she literally saved his son's life. And he's more or less holding her prisoner. She wants to leave and find somewhere to hide until she can select a husband, but Ewan keeps her against her will because he's "protecting" her just like the boy promised. And while he's keeping her prisoner he does a lot of blustering about how she needs to obey him without question because he's the Laird....except he's not HER Laird so there's literally no reason for her to follow his orders. Ewan is really pissy about her not giving her name and backstory so he makes a really vague and stupid threat that she WILL obey him and tell him what he wants to know by tomorrow....but there's no "or else" part of that threat. He literally doesn't have a leg to stand on to try to force her to talk unless he's willing to do something despicable like beat or starve her. So it was a completely meaningless chest-thumping exercise. Then one of the maids sees Mairin bathing and sees the brand on her leg so she rushes to inform Ewan. He immediately decides that he's going to force Mairin to marry him so HE can reap the rewards of the union. It's all completely cold and dispassionate. It was strictly a means to an end for him. He's only mentioned once in his inner monologue that she was pretty so it's not even that we could infer that he wanted to sleep with her so badly that he would have pursued her anyway. Nope, it was all about the money, just like with Cameron. Which makes Ewan just as bad as his arch enemy. Then he waltzes up to the room where Mairin is being held prisoner and announces that they're going to get married. When she protests, Ewan kisses her as a way to shut her up. And TSTL Mairin's brain falls out and she gets all flustered and overwhelmed by her hormones. The next day Crispin happily asks if Mairin is really going to be his new mother and she gets super pissed that Ewan would say such a thing to the boy when she has NOT agreed to marry him. She thinks he's callously using the innocent boy to try to emotionally blackmail her into agreeing with no regard for what it'll do to his son if she refuses and proves his father to be a liar. So she goes barging into a training drill and screams at Ewan. He yells a lot about how she needs to obey him because he's the boss and has a penis, and even states that if she were a man, he'd have killed her for her honor-besmirching accusations. Then, for no reason at all, Mairin decides that she might as well marry Ewan after all because he's better than Cameron. The wedding happens and the celebration afterward is just getting warmed up when word reaches them that Cameron is advancing on them with an army. Ewan drags Mairin upstairs and flat-out rapes her as fast as possible in order to consummate the marriage and prevent any possible attempt to have it annulled. This was a really rough scene to get through. He literally rips her dress apart, does almost no foreplay, and then tears through her maidenhead and doesn't even pause to give her time to adjust because he's got places to be. Then after a half-dozen thrusts he finishes and then shoves Mairin into a corner so he can tear the sheets bearing her virginal blood off the bed and triumphantly carry them into battle as proof of his conquest. Jesus what a douche. There's no reason he had to handle things in this way. He could have just cut himself somewhere and wiped the blood on the sheets, then after the battle, come back to do things properly. Plenty of other romance novel heroes have used that trick when they'd anticipated the wedding and deflowered their brides early... As one might expect, Mairin is crying and upset afterward and doesn't want her husband to touch her. He doesn't actually seem to feel all that bad about handling things the way he did, either. He sort of recognizes that it was a lousy way to introduce her to sex, but he's still too full of himself and his own importance to make it any kind of priority to reassure her or ask for forgiveness. Mairin, meanwhile, has endeavored to get Cripsin to sleep with her every night since in order to prevent sex. After a few nights of this, however, Ewan puts a stop to it. There's an eye-rollingly hokey scene where Mairin says that Ewan isn't very good at sex and, if it's all the same to him, she'd rather they didn't do it anymore. He then proceeds to have sex with her again and she's totally blown away by how amazing he is in the sack. She's got absolutely not hesitation or emotional scars from her rape at his hands just a few nights ago and even gushes about how she was wrong to say he was no good at it. Arrrgh! For the next part of the book, things get very tedious. Mairin does a lot of stupid things that cause Ewan to give his "you must obey me because of my penis" speech and it made me dislike both characters. We also get those aforementioned side plots that come out of nowhere and don't amount to much. One day Mairin gets into a screaming match with one of Ewan's soldiers named Heath. A man we have NEVER met before now so MB hastily gives us a paragraph about how Ewan hadn't really liked the young buck from the start. He was too arrogant and didn't show proper deference to Ewan's status as the mighty possessor of the penis. And at the end of the exchange, Ewan has sentenced the man to death and he's never seen or heard from again. So we were literally introduced to the character in the same chapter where he was written out of the script just so MB could give Mairin a tiny little conflict boost. Lame. Likewise, Ewan sends his brother to a neighboring clan to try to forge an alliance with them. The brother comes racing back one day on a horse he's nearly killed in order to deliver the news that the neighbor is on his way and he's super pissed because apparently he'd secretly been hoping to marry his daughter to Ewan. Again, we've never heard this girl or the marriage mentioned prior to this. We just get this half-paragraph info dump seconds before the event where it's relevant. It's just poor writing. And just to take things to another level, this neighbor is the same one who Ewan was ready to declare war on just a few days ago because one of their soldiers had briefly kidnapped Crispin for ransom. When Ewan found out about this he immediately suspected that the clan leader was in on the dastardly plot...but then he marries Mairin and decides he wants an alliance with the guy and just hand-waves all that stuff away by saying, no the laird totally didn't know about it so we're fine now. Why even write the story so that this other clan was involved in the kidnapping if it was just going to get ignored later on? Meanwhile, Mairin has two brushes with death. First an arrow grazes her and then she drinks from a cup that was intended for Ewan and contained poison. From this point on she basically spends the whole book puking. Lots of puking because of the poison. Then she comes up pregnant and pukes all the time from that. Then she pukes a few more times just when distasteful things are around. Really gross. Speaking of her poisoning, here again, this neighboring clan just happened to be there when she was poisoned and Ewan flat out accused them of being behind it. A grave insult that the clan leader says means war...but then later on he's just like "ah, no big deal. Honest mistake, you're totally forgiven. Let's make this alliance." Why introduce the story line if you're not going to pay it off? Why give people these emotions and then have them just totally get over it with a one-sentence "bah, everything's fine now" kiss off? Ewan has also decided that he's in love with Mairin by now but wants her to say it to him first for some stupid reason. Eventually she does and then he says it back and they all marvel at how wonderful life is now that they're married, in love, pregnant, and expecting her dowry to be delivered any day. Except, instead of the dowry, Ewan receives a message from the king stating that Cameron has lodged a complaint saying that he and Mairin were married and the wedding consummated and that Ewan had stolen her away and been raping her ever since. He further asserts that the baby growing inside Mairin is his, conceived on their wedding night. Ewan, Mairin, his brothers and a few men go to court where a slimy lackey tells them that the king is indisposed and he'll be overseeing the proceedings in the king's stead. Of course the slimy guy is in cahoots with Cameron and after a farce of a hearing, in which one of Ewan's men reveals himself to be a traitor and testifies against Ewan, and Mairin isn't allowed to speak in her own defense at all, he rules that Mairin and her dowry belong to Cameron. Cameron promptly backhands Mairin in front of the entire court, which doesn't give anyone any pause at all but does make Ewan and his brothers go crazy. They're overwhelmed by the castle guards and Ewan desperately yells for Mairin to do whatever she has to in order to survive because he WILL come for her. By this we're left to assume he means for Mairin to allow herself to be raped if that's what it takes to keep her alive. And, quite frankly, that's what it SHOULD have taken, but doesn't because of BS plot nonsense. Cameron, after finally having Mairin not only in his clutches but legally and publicly declared his wife, tries to get her to drink a potion that'll cause a miscarriage. She does some fast talking and convinces him that it doesn't serve his purpose to kill the baby. That he's already publicly claimed the child as his, so he'll get the precious Scotland property everyone's so freaking hot for in just a few more months. Whereas if he kills this baby, she could be left barren afterward and he'll never be able to beget an heir off her and therefore claim the precious land. She even admits that she's desperate to save her baby and will do anything to protect it. He agrees to let the kid live if she'll promise to play the part of his wife. To publicly acknowledge that they're married and to NEVER deny him access to her body whenever he wants it. She agrees and he says he wants it right now...this turns her stomach so she throws up and this, we're supposed to believe, was enough of a turnoff for him that he didn't try again for more than a week. I call total BS on this. Ewan, meanwhile, wakes up in the castle dungeon where a random guard helps him and his men escape. This didn't seem the least bit justified to me and also felt like a lazy cop-out because it was the SECOND TIME in the book that nameless, plot-conveniently sympathetic servants just happened to risk their very lives to help out these people they had NEVER MET BEFORE TODAY. How unbelievably lucky our hero and heroine are...On his way out of the dungeon he tells the guard that he suspects the slimy lackey guy is the scheming vizier behind the throne who wants to be ON the throne and that he's probably poisoning the king so they should check the king's food and drink. Apparently everyone in the king's guard is a f*cking idiot because none of them ever suspected such a thing before this moment. Suddenly it's a week later and Ewan is sneaking into Cameron's castle where he somehow magically knows which window is Mairin's and tosses a grappling hook up. Then he lowers her out the window and they escape without anyone ever being the wiser. Pretty anticlimactic. They ride for days without stopping in order to get back to Ewan's lands but as soon as they cross over, Mairin insists on talking to Ewan alone. He thinks she's going to admit that Cameron raped her and he's dreading hearing about it but feels like he doesn't have a choice since his pain of hearing about it won't be half as bad as her pain was experiencing it and then having to tell him about it. But instead she just wails about how she'd been "disloyal" to Ewan by making that bargain with Cameron to save their child's life, as if that was some how a thing. It was really stupid. I mean, seriously, how could any functioning adult ever think that Ewan would be upset that she'd managed to use her wits to keep his unborn baby alive? So that was lame and stupidly melodramatic for no reason other than to make Ewan and I guess the readers momentarily think that Mairin might have been raped at some point. Back home, no sooner does Ewan finally let her out of his sight again then the guy who turned traitor somehow manages to make it inside Ewan's keep to hold Mairin at knife point. Apparently his mission was to bring her to Cameron. You know, because he'd totally send a lone guy to accomplish that feat instead of riding up with his entire army and the full legal backing of the crown...Mairin manages to save herself and that's over and done with. Then the actual king shows up who, in the definition of Deus Ex Machina, descends from on high to fix everything. He's super grateful that Ewan mentioned to that random guard that he might be being poisoned and now he's on the mend. He's also super happy to meet the previous king's illegitimate daughter and happily hands over her dowry. And that's the end of the book.There's no final showdown with Cameron or any indication that he suffered any consequences from his actions at all, not from Ewan or the king. Totally lame. Oh and as an aside, Mairin had this INCREDIBLY annoying habit of saying out loud things she thought she was only thinking. This was depicted in the book with the words not being in quotes, which made me think they were not said out loud, but then the other person in the room would reply. It made for confusing reading and made Mairin seem really stupid for doing it all the time. (hide spoiler)] All in all, just not a great showing. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Sep 02, 2018
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Sep 02, 2018
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Mass Market Paperback
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| 0843945656
| 9780843945652
| 0843945656
| 3.85
| 5,594
| 1999
| Jan 01, 2007
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it was ok
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This one was okay. It started out good but the whole cross-dressing thing went on for too long and the multiple endings really dragged the story down
This one was okay. It started out good but the whole cross-dressing thing went on for too long and the multiple endings really dragged the story down while also launching it into throwing-popcorn-at-the-screen levels of GTFOOH. (view spoiler)[ As the dust jacket says, our heroine is Charlie (short for Charlotte). She and her twin sister, Beth, are running away from horrible arranged marriages set up by their abusive, alcoholic uncle. Beth is being sold to an old geezer who we later find out has “strange proclivities” in the bedroom while Charlie is set to marry a physically abusive brute who has already put three wives in the ground. Charlie decides they’re too noticeable as twin sisters and hits upon the idea of dressing like a young man and masquerading as Beth’s twin brother instead. They’re climbing out of an inn window in the dead of night when they’re caught by the hero, Radcliffe. Radcliffe buys their story and is totally fooled by the cross-dressing act. He volunteers to escort them to London so they won’t be such easy prey on the road. We soon learn that Radcliffe had a beloved younger sister who was killed along with her husband by a highwayman one night after visiting Radcliffe. He feel responsible for their deaths because he didn’t insist they take a carriage rather than going on horseback. This is the sum total of ALL the depth we get to Radcliffe’s character. He’s a very bland hero, all told. There are a few lines about him being some kind of financial genius but it never really goes anywhere in the story and we don’t see it affecting his character in any way. Even this supposed guilt over his sister’s death doesn’t really amount to much. It’s used to provide some justification for him helping Beth and Charlie at the start but then isn’t mentioned again until the second climax where the villain confesses to murdering the sister and her husband so Radcliffe can conveniently shed all his guilt over the matter. Which I found weird just by itself. Radcliffe is all “oh, it’s not my fault for not keeping them safe that night because this crazy guy would have just killed them some other time instead, my conscience is now totally clear.” Instead of maybe feeling guilty for not having noticed that this guy was crazy before the murders? Or possibly looking a little harder into their deaths rather than just assuming it was this alleged highwayman who’d been working the area but had previously only robbed people, never killed them? But, whatever. Getting back to the story, Beth and Charlie plan to ditch Radcliffe at the first opportunity but one contrivance after another comes up to prevent it until they finally decide to just stay with him. They think he’s a legitimately nice guy and he’s offered to let them live at his house and provide Beth with a season so she can find a husband. Now, at this point in the story, most characters would have come clean about the fact that they’re both girls and then they’d both have been able to have a season and find husbands. But of course they can’t do that because it would make sense, so instead they go on with the charade and promise to trade places every day so they both have a chance to be the girl and the boy. So they keep on with the act, which forces Charlie to share a room and a bed with Radcliffe all during their trip to London. Radcliffe, for his part, is finding the “boy” Charlie to be strangely attractive and he’s totally skeeved out by the idea that he might have some homosexual tendencies. He keeps waking up with his arms wrapped around Charlie and sporting massive wood, then leaping out of bed all pissed off at himself. When they finally get to London, Radcliffe decides that part of the problem is how effeminate the boy is. So he sets out to make a man out of Charlie by taking her to a brothel. I suppose this was meant to be a hilarious series of wacky events but I found the scene to be rather tiresome and overdone. Radcliffe’s bright idea is to give Charlie over to the not-so-tender ministrations of the much older, larger and painted up Madame of the brothel rather than, say, one of the sweeter, younger women who might possibly appeal to a boy his age. The Madame is all set to rape Charlie by any means necessary and ends up tying her to the bed and breaking out the whips and paddles. Charlie screams and Radcliffe finally has second thoughts about his grand plan and goes in to rescue her. The Madame insists on payment and Radcliffe goes to find the wallet he left in another room. (Which sounded like a one-way ticket to getting robbed to me. You never leave your valuables unattended at a brothel, everyone knows that!) While he's gone a confusing set of circumstances has Charlie stumbling to one room where she sees Beth's old codger fiancé and learns of his "strange proclivities" and then into another room where she finds a young girl being kept against her will. Charlie helps the girl escape in the first of what will be many, many rescues she accomplishes throughout the book. It really was getting ridiculous that every time she left the house she stumbled upon yet another hard-luck case who she immediately adopted. Seriously by the end of the book she's adopted this girl, 6 puppies, a widow with 2 small children and an abused young boy. All of whom Radcliffe had to financially support. If I was him, I'd probably stop letting Charlie leave the house before she spotted a neglected elephant or something... Back home Charlie and Beth while away the time by switching back and forth. Radcliffe is super-attracted to Charlie, whatever role she is playing, but totally unmoved by Elizabeth. When Charlie is playing the girl, he swoops in and kisses her. When she's playing the boy, he just feels really uncomfortable for noticing what a great @ss the boy has. Poor Radcliffe was feeling really confused and unsure of himself but it was never explored all that deeply. Not enough to give his character any dimension. For example, he briefly worries about the fact that by kissing "Beth" he's taking advantage of a young girl to whom he's offered his protection and that's dishonorable...but not enough to stop himself from kissing the girl the next time Charlie is the one wearing the dress. And he's also totally confused by his inexplicable desire for this boy when he's not only never been attracted to men before, but he also keeps finding himself crazy in-lust with the sister one day, only to feel unmoved by her the next. This state of affairs goes on for a really long time and it makes the story drag. The author waited too long to get to the punch line. Radcliffe never once suspected the truth throughout this whole long charade and that made him seem kinda dumb. There's even a part where Beth runs off to Gretna Green with her beau and Charlie is left to play both parts and Radcliffe still never suspects anything. It just didn't seem believable that he could spend this much time with Charlie in both guises and not pick up on similarities. Her scent, her mannerisms, the way she walked, etc. Even her voice. Heck, the villain even figured it out...after only seeing Charlie ONCE! FROM BEHIND! And he listed the way she walked and her obviously feminine hips and butt as being the tip-off. So the clinically insane bad guy can spot the truth in a second, but our allegedly super-smart financial genius hero can't even after weeks spent in her company?? Yeah I call BS. Also during all this blandness there’s a strange blackmail scheme going on that didn't really fit with the rest of the story. Charlie gets a note saying that the blackmailer knows who she really is and will tell her uncle if she doesn't pay them off. She goes to meet the person by herself, TWICE. The first time Radcliffe followed her and mistakenly thought she, as the boy, was going into a gaming hell to gamble away all the money left to them by their parents. So the blackmailer has to leave without his payoff, which didn't make a whole lot of sense. Charlie is remarkably unperturbed by the fact that Radcliffe messed up the transaction. She's not worried that the blackmailer will spill her secret, etc. She just kind of shrugs and assumes he'll get back in touch to set up another meeting. Which he eventually does, when it's most convenient for the plot. And that time is: the day after Charlie and Radcliffe finally sleep together. It was a weird scene. Beth is off eloping with her beau so Charlie is playing the girl role while also keeping some pillows stuffed under the sheets to indicate that the boy is sick. Radcliffe has once again found himself wildly attracted to the girl he thinks is Beth so he decides he might as well just marry her. He wants to talk to the brother to get his blessing or whatever but Charlie is desperate to keep the charade going for....reasons. I really didn't get it. I mean, Beth is off getting married right now but plans to rush back so that she can then play the role of the boy full time and Charlie can continue to attend balls and search for a husband.....so Beth was going to be married but not living with her husband for some undefined amount of time and masquerading as a boy, including going to gambling halls and so forth and he was totally fine with that? And they're all just going to keep on lying to Radcliffe until Charlie finds a husband...while going by the name Beth...and then once she's engaged to some guy who doesn't even know her real name the real Beth will rip off her powdered wig and say "ha-ha! it was all a lie, we're actually both girls!"?? What kind of sense does that make? But anyway, Charlie is so desperate to keep Radcliffe from finding out the truth that she distracts him with kisses and all his allegedly noble intentions to marry her first go right out the window and they just go ahead and have sex. The scene was light on description and emotion which didn't do anything to make me believe their romance and the next morning Charlie wakes up with Radcliffe already gone without even a few murmured words of affection. Then she hears him knocking on the brother's door and she has to race through the connecting door and hastily don her boy clothes as Radcliffe barges in and very un-gracefully explains that he's just deflowered the boy's sister. He says a lot of half-sentences that are set up so that the author can create the Big Misunderstanding. He appears to say that he doesn't love "Beth" but that he "er-ed" her. (As in, "It's about your sister. I er...." "You er-ed my sister?") Charlie gets pretty pissed about the whole thing which Radcliffe mistakes as justifiable brotherly outrage over the loss of "Beth's" virtue. Radcliffe makes it plain that he's going to propose to her to set this situation to rights, but of course never gives any indication of affection for her so Charlie basically tells him to do whatever, but is of course planning to spit in Radcliffe's face when he comes to propose to "Beth". But before Radcliffe can get back with a ring, another letter comes from the blackmailer and this time Charlie takes Bessie, the girl she saved from the brothel, along disguised as Beth. In order to accomplish this, she had to let both Bessie and the widow with the two kids she rescued (who is now the cook) in on her secret. None of these other people had ever suspected the truth either. Not even the ladies maid who was helping the girls wash and dress had any idea they were two different people. Sure. The blackmailer takes the money Charlie brought to pay him off and then kidnaps the two girls to deliver them to the uncle and the arranged husbands up at Gretna Green. The real Beth returns from her hasty marriage and by pure coincidence, happened to have seen the uncle and the fiancés at an inn along the road so she and her now husband rushed back to warn Charlie. Radcliffe is worried and confused as to how Beth can be standing there on the doorstep newly married when she was in his arms last night losing her virginity and also supposedly left just a few hours ago with her brother. In a tortuously long scene Beth has to painstakingly connect all the dots for him before he finally catches a clue. The cook reveals the blackmail and saw the note but can't quite remember the meeting place. Then, in another scene that I'm sure was supposed to be hilarious but just came across as forced slapstick, Beth, her husband, Radcliffe, his butler, the new cook AND her two kids all pile into a carriage to race over to the meeting area so the cook can look at the names of the inns until one jogs her memory. Then after a short stop to threaten the innkeeper into revealing that the bad guys' plan was to take the girls to Grenta Green, they all pile back into the carriage like popes in a Volkswagen and decide they all need to go on this adventure...even the two small children! They end up catching up to the bad guys at Gretna Green but then don't know how to get Charlie away from them so the action comes to a screeching halt for a bunch of pages. The uncle is sleeping and never rises before noon, so the bad guys just stand around with Charlie and Bessie still in the carriage for a few hours. Then they take Bessie and leave the door unlocked so Charlie just gets out and walks away. Ooookay that was kind of...anticlimactic. She goes in search of Bessie, vowing to get her out of this mess since Charlie's the one who forced her to come. Meanwhile, Radcliffe, Beth and her husband are standing around trying to come up with a plan, which Beth eventually does. She says that if "Charlie" and Radcliffe get married, then her uncle can't force her to wed someone else. So Beth plays the part of Charlie and signs Charlie's name on the license, then they leave. 20 minutes later, Bessie is dragged before the same officiant and forced to marry the codger Beth was lined up for. This makes her a duchess or something and when the guy finally takes off her veil he has a heart attack and falls over dead, apparently leaving her the sole heir. Charlie raced in and tried to stop the wedding but failed and now the uncle and her abusive fiancé are there and try to force her to marry. Except the officiant, who had no qualms whatsoever about Bessie being married against her expressed wishes, staunchly refuses to marry Charlie "twice" because that would be wrong. Radcliffe and crew finally wander up, show the license and when the uncle says he'll have the marriage annulled because they can't have consummated it yet, Radcliffe happily confesses to deflowering her a few nights earlier. The abuser wanders off to buy some other poor girl, the uncle is pissed but also disappears into the ether, and the rest go back to London. But wait! That's not the end! The story picks up 2 weeks later with Charlie unhappy. Radcliffe, now that he knows she's a girl, has completely changed the way he interacts with her. Supposedly when she was a boy he laughed and joked and discussed politics and business investments with her, although we never once saw that happen on-page. But now that she's a girl he refuses to discuss anything more mentally taxing than the weather and treats her like an inferior. This was a weird shift in Radcliffe's character that wasn't handled very well. We didn't see any of it happening, we were just told about it after the fact. A message arrives for Radcliffe while he's out and Charlie looks at it and sees it's a message from the blackmailer threatening to tell the whole world...something. It's not really important, it was just a threat to get Radcliffe to come meet the blackmailer. Oh and the ones who kidnapped Charlie and Bessie were just go-betweens for this REAL blackmailer or something like that. Like I said, not important. The meeting place is that same brothel Radcliffe took Charlie to and the villain is some guy named Norwich who Charlie danced with once at a ball. He also happens to be Radcliffe's dead sister's husband’s step-brother. He monologues for a while about how he killed Radcliffe’s sister for various convoluted reasons and now plans to kill Radcliffe and marry Charlie because that’s how things work. So he locks Charlie up. Back home, Radcliffe and Beth figure out that Charlie is missing and find the blackmail note. And in a COMPLETELY ridiculous turn of events, they dress Radcliffe in a frilly pink dress and gaudy makeup so that he can approach the brothel without them knowing it's him. This is the point where I'd have been throwing popcorn at the screen if this was a movie. This was so over-the-top that I started skimming. There's a whole long scene with some gigantic guy mistaking Radcliffe for the prostitute he's sweet on and groping Radcliffe's butt while apparently having no idea it's a man he's holding. Seriously, what is wrong with the people in this book? When Radcliffe finds Charlie, the villain catches them pretty quick...but then just locks both of them in the room instead of killing Radcliffe like he supposedly wants to because...he planned to do the killing at midnight and it's not midnight yet. Are you f*cking kidding me? Charlie decides that Radcliffe must really love her if he'd wear a frilly pink dress to come rescue her and he's like, duh, of course I do. And she says she loves him back. But then they immediately start fighting about how Radcliffe has been treating her differently and he's shocked to realize it's true and that he really did think of her as being stupider now that he knows she's a woman. Charlie claims that they're not really married since she wasn't actually present for the ceremony and that she's not sure she really wants to be married to him anymore. They finally make their escape with the help of Beth, the butler and I think Beth's husband but who really cares at this point. The villain and the Madame are allegedly dealt with off page by the authorities. The epilogue picks up a year later with some bizarre stuff about Charlie "finally" consenting to marry Radcliffe again/for real this time but insisting that it has to be done exactly on their one year anniversary so it won't be confusing for everyone to have 2 different dates because, you know, that's what's important here. But she's 9 months pregnant when the big day arrives so this whole "we're not really married" business sounds like a lot of overly dramatic hogwash since they were obviously still living and sleeping together during the last year. She's late to the wedding because she spotted a man hitting a boy and naturally jumped the guy, along with Beth, who is ALSO hugely pregnant. They were busy ripping the guy's hair out when Radcliffe and Beth's husband showed up and just resignedly offered to buy the boy off the guy. And, of course, Charlie goes into labor while all this is going on but insists on getting married first. In the typical fiction "oh my god the baby's coming we have to rush through whatever we're currently doing" fashion, they yell at the priest until he distills the ceremony down to "Do you? Do you? Great, you're married" and they go on their way....and then sit around waiting for another 12 hours as labor slowly progresses. The baby is a boy and everyone is happy. The end. (hide spoiler)] Yeah so this book kind of lost me by the end. It started out okay but the gender-bending went on way too long and all the supposed-to-be-funny wacky scenarios went over like a lead balloon with me. Radcliffe started out a decent, if bland, hero but the second climax and the epilogue made him out to be a totally different, and worse, person. He suddenly adopted heretofore unseen misogynistic behaviors and then when he was called on it he went totally, 100% in the other direction and became a p*ssy-whipped, beta. Charlie started out pretty strong and interesting but continued the charade for literally no reason, put herself and others in stupidly dangerous situations, and then turned into this awful fishwife by the end. Can't really recommend. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
|
Jul 17, 2018
|
Jul 18, 2018
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Mass Market Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 1460312503
| 9781460312506
| B00B0A71YC
| 3.14
| 96
| Apr 23, 2013
| May 01, 2013
|
it was ok
|
This is the second book in a trilogy and it suffers from the stereotypical second book syndrome in that it lacks substance and is just marking time un
This is the second book in a trilogy and it suffers from the stereotypical second book syndrome in that it lacks substance and is just marking time until the final book can give all the big reveals. I haven't read the first book but, based on the reviews, it was a pretty standard romance novel. In this book, there are a lot of references to something that happened in the first book and plenty of discussion of the over-arching story that binds the trilogy together so that you don't have to have read the first one to know what's going on, which is good. The main problem with this book is that it's boring and toothless. Nothing really happens. The relationship between the hero and heroine doesn't build organically. The villain of the series isn't scary and there's no payoff or hook given to that over-arching story at the end of this one. It's like reading air. (view spoiler)[ The backstory is that Alexander had a horrible childhood. His mother married an abusive man who already had one son and some time after Alex was born she abandoned all three males to run off with some lover. Alex, though he was his father's second son, was actually in line to inherit a title and big money from his mother's side of the family. This, in addition to Alex's incredible good looks, made his older half-brother hate him so much that he repeatedly attacked Alex and, in their later years, even tried to kill him. Alex chose to go into the army rather than stay home and risk being murdered in his sleep by his jealous brother. While he was there, he was captured by the enemy and tortured for some amount of time. However the only lasting affects of that ordeal seem to be some small scars on his face and a discoloration in his eye. At one point Persephone, the heroine, asks him if his vision is affected but we never find out, which is lame. When Alex got back from the war, his half-brother and father were dead and his female cousin, the only one in the family who ever treated him with kindness, is missing. Something about these circumstances makes Alex suspect that his dear old school mate, Jack, was involved in the disappearance in some nefarious way. Ashamed of his scars, he met with Jack in the dead of night with the intent of doing something bad. This midnight meeting happened in the previous book and that's all the detail we get on it. But it was at this meeting that Alex and Persephone met again. She'd been only 12 when they last saw each other, but she'd had a big crush on him. He hadn't really noticed her then because she was 12 and he wasn't a pedophile. But during this midnight meeting she apparently jumped on Alex to protect Jack and the attraction between them roared to life. So that's the setup leading into this book. This one starts with Jack and Jessica's wedding. For the next 5/6 of the book we just sit through page after page of Persephone and Alex bickering with each other. That's seriously pretty much all that happens. They snark at each other over and over, him saying that she's "the great Persephone Seaborne" and that she likes having all the men falling at her feet, and her calling him bull-headed and overbearing. Occasionally the author would slip a line or two in to indicated that they were both attracted to each other but the whole thing was pretty tedious. Persephone's younger brother, Mark, gets kidnapped the night of the wedding and she and Alex contrive to keep this fact a secret so it won't break her poor mother's heart. They know intuitively that the reason Mark was kidnapped was to try to draw Rich, Persephone's older brother, out of hiding along with Alex's missing cousin, who they've realized have gone off together in order to be safe from this unseen enemy. The enemy had hoped Jack's wedding would draw Rich out of hiding but when it didn't, he went with plan B. Except this plan is incredibly toothless. Yes, he kidnaps Mark but then he has him kept in a room with a poor family as his jailers and instructs them that Mark is to be kept hale and hearty during his imprisonment. So...yeah, nothing to worry about here, readers. And we're supposed to buy that Mark actually grew into a respectable young man during his 2-week imprisonment and fell in love with the sharp-tongued daughter who was his only human contact for that time. And everyone is totally okay with that when he reveals his intention to marry her. Yep, no Stockholm syndrome here folks... So the whole book is Alex trying to find Persephone's brother, the two of them bickering, then sharing a kiss or two, then flashing over to see the brother being totally fine. There was nothing really to keep you turning the pages. No suspense over the brother's fate or whether they'd catch the bad guy since we already know that there's another book to come. And the relationship development was all done through these long bickerfests. The only real action comes when Alex and Persephone meet at midnight to discuss her brother and end up having some hanky panky, which then lands them in hot water when Persephone's jealous cousin flings open the door to show two witnesses that Persephone is now compromised, thereby forcing her and Alex to wed. But that doesn't really come to much since she and Alex are both pretty much fine with the idea, and so is her mother. And following that, there's a really cringe-worthy scene where Persephone decides she wants to have sex (the previous time they only got to third base) and Alex says no, not until they're married because he gave his word to Jack that he wouldn't seduce her in Jack's absence. Persephone pitches a hissy fit about the whole thing which didn't endear her character to me. I get that it was presumptuous and hypocritical of Jack to make a decree like that when he himself had been shagging his bride-to-be every night leading up to their wedding, but still. Listening to Persephone shrilly stamp her foot and complain on and on about it just made me want to smack her. Like she thought she could nag Alex into wanting to break his word just so he could have sex with her waspish self? The whole thing was just really unromantic and irritating. And that's pretty much it. The climax at the end is about them going to rescue Mark but there's no suspense or real action in it since we already know that Mark is totally fine. It's mainly Persephone standing in the dark, worrying. And the fight between Alex and the villain amounts to half a paragraph of them scuffling in the dark before the villain manages to break free and run away. Very toothless and makes Alex seem pretty lame for not being able to catch the guy who was literally in his grasp. In fact, Alex felt pretty lame throughout the whole book, because he let the motor-mouth Persephone nag him into doing whatever she wanted, except on the sex thing. Even her presence at this rescue mission was accomplished by her nagging and Alex giving in. A real beta hero when you get right down to it. (hide spoiler)] So all in all, I didn't hate this book but I didn't really like it either. Persephone was an annoying nag and Alex a beta who caved to her nagging on almost every front. The villain was no real threat at all and nothing was resolved with the over-arching story. So if you're reading the series, you won't be missing much if you decide to skip this one. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
|
Jun 27, 2018
|
Jul 04, 2018
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Kindle Edition
| ||||||||||||||
| 0373131518
| 9780373131518
| 0373131518
| 3.56
| 845
| May 21, 2013
| May 21, 2013
|
it was ok
|
The Sheikh’s Prize is book 2 in the A Bride for a Billionaire series. I read book 3 first and the continuity between the two stories is pretty off. In
The Sheikh’s Prize is book 2 in the A Bride for a Billionaire series. I read book 3 first and the continuity between the two stories is pretty off. In book 3, we’re told that Emmie, the heroine of that book, always felt like she was in her twin sister, Saffy, the heroine of this book’s shadow because Saffy was beautiful and outgoing and loved by all, while Emmie was disabled from a car crash and self-conscious. But here in Book 2, we’re told that Saffy had been carrying two major emotional wounds herself all though their childhood and it made her feel self-conscious and unworthy. So it seems like she wouldn’t have been the out-going social butterfly Emmie made her out to be. And I have to say, when Saffy’s issues are revealed, it just makes me dislike Emmie all the more for her self-inflicted martyrdom because Saffy’s baggage is way worse than Emmie’s. It made me wish that Saffy’s truths had come out during Emmie’s book so Emmie could see how self-involved and self-pitying she had been her whole life, totally convinced that she alone had gotten such a raw deal while everyone else led a charmed life. But I won't go down that road again, I ranted about it enough in my review of Emmie's book. Suffice it to say that I came out of that book with the impression that the estrangement between Emmie and Saffy was 100% Emmie's fault and that Saffy was a great, understanding person, which is why I decided to read her book, despite giving Emmie's book 1 star. Unfortunately, the good impression I had of Saffy coming out of book 3 was completely wrecked by her behavior in book 2. Even though her baggage is legit, she still spends the whole book acting like an irrational self-involved harpy. The most egregious example of which comes at the end when the hero confesses the Big Dark Secret and all she can think about is herself. The only thing that made this book marginally better than Emmie's was that I liked the hero a little better (view spoiler)[ Okay so this whole book is a pretty ridiculous study in contradictions and repetitive language. As I noted in book 3, Lynne Graham has a very unhealthy obsession with eye porn and nipples. In this book she also adds in highly repeated references to “even white teeth” and some hair porn as well. All of which takes up an inordinate amount of page time that could have been better spent developing a meaningful relationship between our hero and heroine. And the contradictions were pretty egregious. In the beginning, we meet the hero, Zahir, who is the king of a made up nation called Maraban. His brother runs in to exclaim over the fact that Zahir's shameless, heartless, slutty ex-wife, Sapphire, who is a world-famous supermodel, had the nerve to come to Maraban for a photo shoot. Zahir thinks some very scathing things about how awful Saffy is. How she's nothing more than an unrepentant gold-digger with a "cash register for a heart" (he uses that exact phrase twice). The reason he thinks this is because Saffy took the 5 million pounds of alimony he's been sending her for the last 5 years since their marriage broke up. He admits that this amount of money is mere pocket change to him, but he still thinks she's a gold-digger for taking it.....and then at the end when they've made up and it turns out Saffy never knew about the alimony and instead her lawyer had been stealing it, Zahir gets upset because he'd "wanted her to have the money so she'd be taken care of." So...why was he so scathing toward her in the beginning about the money if he'd wanted her to have it in the first place?? It doesn't make sense, other than as the author trying to artificially bump up the agnst level in the beginning but find a reason to make it all okay for the HEA at the end. We move on to Sapphire's perspective and she's uncomfortable being in Maraban but didn't have a choice because of a last-minute change to their shooting location. She thinks about Zahir and how much she hates him, even as she uses her memories of his body to achieve the "sultry" look the photographer wants to capture. Then she gets in a limo and is kidnapped and brought to Zahir at an isolated compound in the middle of the desert. Here Saffy throws tantrums and shrieks and calls Zahir every name in the book, it was all very tedious. Particularly because Saffy's inner monologue explains that during their year-long marriage she'd constantly thrown the possibility of divorce in Zahir's face whenever they fought, which was all the time, but that she'd never expected him to take her up on that. And that he'd cut her to the core by finally divorcing her, like it was all his fault. So she's got not qualms about admitting that she's one of those women who a) says things she doesn't mean and yet expects the man to read her mind about it, and b) refuses to take ownership for her part in the relationship. And then at the end, we find out that Zahir loved Saffy more than life itself and only divorced her to protect her from his tyrannical father, who was threatening to have her murdered. And Saffy goes on and on about how much she was still in love with Zahir when their marriage ended too and how she would have done anything to stay with him....so why do they hate each other so much at the beginning of the book? Zahir even reveals that, once he'd led the revolution to depose his father, he'd gone in search of Saffy, desperate to have back the love of his life, but that Saffy's sister, Kat, had turned him away, saying that Saffy had only just gotten over him and was better off. So yeah, I'm not seeing anything in all of this that suggests that these two should hate each other at the start of the book. Getting back to the story, Zahir comes straight out and tells Saffy that he kidnapped her for sex. Apparently throughout their entire year-long marriage, they never once had sex. Saffy freaked out whenever Zahir touched her. They were both virgins and Zahir has always assumed that it was his lack of skills that made Saffy turn away from him. Especially because he's followed her love life in the tabloids and "knows" that she'll hook up with any guy who catches her fancy. Now that he's taken a few laps around the lady buffet and knows what he's doing in the bedroom, he wants a second chance to have the one that got away. Naturally the truth is that the tabloids are all just sensationalizing things and Saffy is still a virgin, a fact that she finds shameful. What follows is a very tedious no-no-no-yes from Saffy. She goes on and on and ON about how she refuses to sleep with Zahir. That he's the last man on earth she'd choose to be with and yada yada yada....then abruptly does a complete 180 and tells him to hurry up and get on the bed. She seriously said "never in a million years" and "let's do this" within 2 minutes of each other. It was very jarring to read and not adequately justified in the narrative. We keep getting hints that Saffy had some big issue that required 5 years of therapy to overcome and how she feels she needs to rid herself of her virginity in order to be normal and have a normal relationship with a man. And without warning she just decides that Zahir may as well be the one to relieve her of that pesky hymen since he's the only man she's ever felt even remotely attracted to....but she still hates him! She assures herself that SHE'S using HIM. That even though he kidnapped her for sex, by her being the one to say "ok let's have sex" she's turning the tables on him in an important way. Zahir, for his part, was pretty tedious throughout this whole section too. It was pretty irritating the way he talked down to Saffy for being pissed off that she'd been kidnapped. I mean, dude, come on. And he continued to think the worst of her all throughout the time they were together. Saying that every word out of her mouth was clearly a lie, even though when we read the ending we see he had no reason whatsoever to think that she was ever anything but honest with him. He's a little caught off guard when Saffy suddenly agrees to sex but that's what he's there for so he doesn't really question it. The sex scene itself was pretty squicky. We're in Saffy's head for most of it and she spends the whole time thinking "I hope I don't freak out. Oh God, am I about to freak out? Oh please don't let me freak out. I have to get through this so I can be normal. Oh crap, I'm not doing it right, I'd better try to show some enthusiasm or he'll know I'm freaking out..." And so on. For the time we're in Zahir's perspective, he makes reference to the fact that Saffy is laying there, stiff and "like a human sacrifice" and questions whether that's how she really feels about sleeping with him. He offers to stop at that point, which was good, but when she opts to solider on, he doesn't have any trouble rising to the occasion. So all of this made for a really unromantic setup, which made it super hard to believe that Saffy actually achieved orgasm, and that Zahir found the experience to be "incredible." So incredible, in fact, that he's completely hooked on her after that. They haven't even caught their breath afterward when Saffy asks if she's "earned" her trip to the airport yet. Then she gets up and goes into the bathroom. Zahir then notices that a) there's blood on the sheets and b) that the condom they used broke. He, believing she sleeps around (an idea Saffy has deliberately fostered), doesn't even consider the possibility that she might have been a virgin and instead assumes he'd hurt her. She stonewalls and says that it's just "been a long time" for her. He asks if she's on birth control and she lies and says that she is. 10 days later, Saffy's back home and showing signs of pregnancy. Zahir shows up and tries to bully her into becoming his mistress. He's already purchased a luxury apartment in London and gotten her a car. He'll visit her whenever he can but she's forbidden to sleep with other men because he doesn't share. He's already got movers poised to pack up her things and move her out of the house of her current "lover." Saffy tells him to get lost but all he has to do is trace a hand down her bare skin and she melts into a puddle and they end up having sex up against the wall. Zahir thinks this settles the matter but Saffy tells him no again then passes out. When she comes-to, she blurts out that she thinks she's pregnant. Then the roommate comes home and he's the classic gay best friend. He and Saffy use each other as beards. Him so he won't have to come out to his elderly grandparents, and her to keep men with gropey hands at bay. Saffy informs Zahir that he's been her only lover and he immediately believes her and insists they get married. Saffy dithers for a little while then finally agrees, but only to legitimize the baby. She says they'll get a divorce after a year or so, then paradoxically insists they have a big, flashy wedding, unlike the sterile and cold courthouse affair they had the first time. The wedding plans happen entirely off page and it's just suddenly the big day. Saffy is unhappy because she keeps thinking about all the other women Zahir must have slept with since their divorce. Then one of her supermodel frenemies happily informs Saffy that she slept with Zahir at some art festival a few years back. This puts Saffy in a nasty mood for the flight back to Maraban. Then Zahir springs it on her that he's bought the company who owns her modeling contract because he "doesn't want anyone putting pressure on her" to stay thin or travel a lot or do anything that'll affect her pregnancy. He also says that for security reasons, she won't be able to go to certain parts of the world because they'd be too difficult to provide protection for her. Saffy blows up that he's trying to control her life and insists that her career is very important to her and she's worked hard to build it these last five years so she doesn't want it to change. (A statement she completely contradicts at the end when she swears blind that she never really cared about her career and would have given it up in a heartbeat to have stayed with Zahir during their first marriage) Zahir calls her childish for not recognizing that her life has to change now that she's a queen. Saffy stomps her foot and wails that she doesn't want to be a queen. That it had never occurred to her that by marrying a king she would therefore necessarily become a queen and all the responsibility that would entail. Then she scathingly thanks him for making this wedding night just as awful as their last one and then stomps off to the bedroom on the plane....and then gets mad that Zahir doesn't follow her for sex. Yeah. This was one of those times when she's said one thing but expects him to psychically know that she meant the opposite. And how ridiculous is it for the two of them to have never discussed all of this queen-protection business before they got married?? I blame both of them for that. They touch down in the country and Saffy starts being nice again, not throwing a tantrum when Zahir is immediately taken away for running-the-country business. Then Zahir's brother from the beginning of the book yells at Saffy and calls her names for "abandoning Zahir just when he needed her most" and reveals that their father had been torturing Zahir all throughout their marriage. That when he was gone for weeks at a time, allegedly on "military maneuvers" Zahir was actually being beaten, starved and tortured to try to force him to divorce Saffy. He endured it all and didn't say anything because he didn't want her to know that she was the source of so much pain. And also, allegedly, because he was embarrassed that he'd been so naive about his father's true nature and that he was powerless to protect himself or her. Then he'd come home and Saffy would pick fights with him because she was lonely and bored and forced to live in total isolation because his father wouldn't acknowledge the marriage. After all this is revealed to Saffy, she runs away from Zahir, insisting that she needs to be alone to process the news. And as we, the reader, follow along in her inner monologue, do you know what she thinks? She says "how could he do this to her?" Seriously. She's upset that Zahir has now trumped her in the "I've got something to be pissed off about" competition that was their marriage. She actually yells at him for "making" her look like the most awful, self-absorbed, heartless b*tch by letting her go on and on with her whining complaints while he was being literally tortured. Wow Saffy. It really is just all about you, isn't it? And how is it possible that she had no clue how badly Zahir was being injured during these sessions? We're told all about the horrific scars he has on his back that must have necessarily been caused by very deep cuts, so how could he be that badly hurt and yet Saffy totally unaware? I don't buy it. Saffy ultimately reveals her big dark secret as well, which is that she was molested by one of her mother's boyfriends and that's why she freaked out about sex. She'd repressed the memories and required hypno-therapy in order to remember, then had to have intensive treatments to get over the knee-jerk freak-out reaction she had to sex. Oh and she holds herself responsible for the car accident that temporarily crippled Emmie, even though it makes no sense for her to have thought that. She wasn't driving and hadn't coerced Emmie into going with them so...But she also believes she made her and Emmie's father cut off all contact because he used Emmie's accident as an excuse to leave. Possibly something you could see a 16 year old girl thinking, but by the time the book starts, you'd have thought Saffy would have realized that made no sense. Especially with all the therapy she's allegedly undergone. (hide spoiler)] And that kind of sums up the whole thing. When you get to the end, none of the facts actually support the way Saffy and Zahir were acting at the start. And given the facts, I don't understand why they didn't just sit down and have a chat with each other when they were finally brought back together. A simple "let's clear the air" session at the start would have solved virtually all their problems. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
3
|
not set
not set
not set
|
May 18, 2018
not set
not set
|
Jun 01, 2018
|
Mass Market Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0373131674
| 9780373131679
| 0373131674
| 3.39
| 979
| Jul 23, 2013
| Jul 23, 2013
|
did not like it
|
When I finished Billionaire’s Trophy I immediately ran to the internet to look up Lynne Graham's book list because I was convinced that this must be o
When I finished Billionaire’s Trophy I immediately ran to the internet to look up Lynne Graham's book list because I was convinced that this must be one of her earliest novels. I'm shocked to find that it's not because Billionaire's Trophy is very badly written. In most books that I dislike it's because the characters' actions piss me off or the plot is full of holes, etc., but this one really is down to the writing. For one thing, the repetition was off the freaking charts. In practically every scene we're told about Bastian's gorgeous black-fringed golden eyes and Emmie's striking blue ones. And in about 90% of those instances the eye-porn was quickly followed by a pat recitation of how Emmie's nipples were elongating and explosions were happening in her pelvis. It was ridiculously intrusive. And while LG wasted TONS of time on that boringly repetitive nonsense, she totally failed to demonstrate our couple developing any kind of relationship whatsoever. It's an extremely short book and the hero and heroine spend almost no time together. What little time they do share is completely taken up with easily-avoidable arguments and then with no demonstrated shift to their relationship, suddenly they're both confessing their love. Just totally unsatisfying all the way around. (view spoiler)[ Okay, so the back of the book gives you the premise. Bastian needs a beautiful woman to act as his arm candy at his sister’s wedding because his ex will be there. He sees Emmie's picture on an escort website, recognizes her as his mousey intern, and books her time. It’s all a mistake, of course, because she’s pure as the driven snow, but she still agrees to go with him. One of the reasons I picked up the book was because I really wanted to find out just how LG managed to swing this scenario so that it was believable. And I think she more or less pulled it off. There were about half a dozen reasons used to force Emmie into it and while they're all ridiculous because the situation is ridiculous, I think LG did enough to make the circumstances seem at least plausible enough that it will satisfy the average reader's need to maintain the suspension of disbelief. There were 2 plot holes though. 1) Emmie’s deadbeat mom claims she paid for a surgery a decade ago that allowed Emmie to walk again and Emmie never thinks to double-check that info before letting her mom emotionally blackmail her into keeping the contract with Bastian. And 2) Emmie refuses to just tell Bastian the truth about the escort service because it’s somehow less embarrassing for him to think she’s a prostitute than to admit that her mother runs the service. Sure... Anyway, Emmie finally agrees to go on the trip with Bastian and he insists on giving her the Cinderella treatment and buying her new clothes...and then we completely skip over that part. We move instantly from Emmie agreeing to go, to her walking through the airport already looking like a million bucks. It was very jarring. Emmie's twin sister is a supermodel and paparazzi in the airport think Emmie is the famous twin so they start chasing her for photos. Bastian sees this and yet doesn't even think to question why this would be occurring. He is, however, turned on by Emmie's new look and kisses her right there in the airport. Emmie's nipples elongate and her pelvis yells "fire in the hole!" so she kisses him back, but then gets super pissy with him afterward. She lectures him on having bad manners, says he “sulks like a woman” and just in general acts like a royal pill, all because she’s embarrassed by her treacherous body’s response to him. After doing this and then unconcernedly settling down for a nap, Emmie executes a complete 180 (which will be a pattern with her for the rest of the book) by suddenly and inexplicably deciding that she feels bad for being such a brat. They’re in a helicopter when she has this epiphany and can’t talk so she bizarrely writes “I’m sorry” on the back of her hand of all things and shows it to him. Bastian psychically knows exactly what she’s sorry for and mentally falls all over himself complimenting her for being different than every other woman he’s known because she has the guts to apologize. They land at his family estate in Greece and Bastian tries to get some sugar from the apparently now better-tempered Emmie. Their golden and sparkling blue eyes collide, her nipples start limbering up for their journey and her pelvis unpacks the dynamite and fuses but Emmie studiously rejects his advances. They go inside and some unruly teenager somehow pushes Emmie into the pool while also rendering her unconscious. Apparently Bastian jumped in to save her, which would have been exciting to see and experience from his perspective but it gets totally skipped over. We just wake up with Emmie in bed and wet. Bastian is being kind to her but she's prickly, as usual. I'm not really sure why LG included this whole pool business since it didn't really accomplish anything in the story. Next thing we know, Emmie is coming downstairs for the rehearsal dinner and Bastian is super turned on by her. We get almost no description of what happened during the dinner, but plenty more references to both characters' eyes and Emmie's elongating nipples. However LG does make it a point to say that Emmie drinks enough wine that she's having trouble feeling her legs by the time Bastian announces that they're going to have a one-night stand. Emmie puts up some very token protests but her nipples are practically in a different post code by now and her pelvis is busy filing permits for all the explosions so she gives in. She does, however, inform Bastian that she's "not cheap." Since he already thinks she's an escort who sleeps with her clients for extra money, he assumes that she's informing him of her vagina's price tag, though he's too far gone to try to haggle and just privately resolves to give her diamonds when they're through. So they have sex and in a completely unbelievable turn of events, Bastian "forgets" to use protection. This is ludicrous when he thinks she's essentially a prostitute and could be riddled with STDs. Not to mention that he had had several inner monologue musings over when she'd start trying to scheme more money out of him, so he should especially be wary of the ultimate financial trap - pregnancy. Since we’d gotten almost no description of interaction between the two, I didn’t believe that Bastian could possibly be THIS out of his mind with lust. It also never crosses Emmie’s virginal mind to use protection, even though she knows Bastian has been around the block a few thousand times. Ridiculous. Naturally the sex is incredible and Bastian actually manages to notice that she was a virgin. He rather insensitively, but truthfully, says that he'd expected their night together to be just an "ordinary shag," not some momentous "I'm giving you my v-card" occasion. Emmie gets extremely hurt by this statement but I really couldn't understand why. She knew before she slept with him what he thought about her, so why is she suddenly acting like he should have magically known she wasn't a hooker after all? And at no point during the buildup to their sexual encounter did Emmie think or say anything about this being more than just one night of sex for her. She didn’t fancy herself in love with Bastian at the time and wasn’t envisioning that it was the start of some meaningful relationship, so what was her problem with what Bastian said? Yeah it was a little tactless to imply that she was nothing special right after having sex, but there was nothing in his statement that contradicted how Emmie herself had viewed their encounter just seconds earlier. But never mind all that logic, Emmie is mortally wounded by his words. She finally comes clean about how her picture came to be on the escort website and Bastian is pretty pissed that she didn’t just tell him the truth back at his office. He says that he’s not a monster and wouldn’t have forced her to fulfill the contract if he knew the truth. Emmie says some scathing things, essentially putting all the blame on him even though she created the situation. She even explains about her leg just to complete her picture as the poor, innocent waif beaten down by the world. After all this talking, Emmie hates Bastian for not being psychic enough to realize the truth. So she runs to her room to cry and sulk. Before the scene ends, Bastian inquires if she’s on any kind of birth control. She’s completely shocked and dismayed by the question and puts the blame 100% on him when he says he forgot to use a condom. Because this poor little girl, who later on refers to herself as a “career woman” who doesn't want to just be kept at home by some man, couldn’t possibly take responsibility for her own body’s protection. Nope, that job was solely on Bastian and he failed, the scoundrel. Now she hates him even more. The next day is the wedding and Emmie hides in her room all morning, no longer caring that her sole purpose for being there is to keep Bastian’s predatory ex-fiancée at bay. During this time we get some more navel-gazing from Emmie regarding her twin sister, Sapphire. Emmie has basically cut Saffy out of her life because she, Emmie, is a pathetic self-pitying twit. She talks about how hard it was to be in Saffy’s shadow when they were teenagers. That her disability made people uncomfortable around her and made her self-conscious and so looking at the not only physically perfect but also very popular, confident and outgoing Saffy made her feel even worse. She even acknowledges that Saffy tried to be there for her during her time of need but that Emmie pushed her out. And now, even a decade later when she’s physically whole, she’s still punishing Saffy for no reason. This, on top of everything else we’ve seen of Emmie, just comes together to show her as a pathetic, ungrateful, self-pitying and self-destructive person whose problems are 100% of her own making but who systematically puts the blame on those around her. Getting back to the story, Bastian’s sister, the bride, finally has to take time out of getting ready for her own damn wedding to come get Emmie out of her room. So Emmie dresses and deigns to make an appearance at the big event. Bastian doesn't get why she's being so sulky and, frankly, neither do I, but he's pretty nice to her. Though his inner monologue is full of irritation that she’s choosing to be mad when he, God’s gift to women, who has every female in a 10,000 mile radius falling at his feet and begging to service him, actually deigned to apologize to her. An event he can’t recall ever happening before so he personally attaches quite a lot of significance to. He’s also super-attracted to Emmie still and sees no reason why they can’t keep sleeping together. He has to dance with his ex as part of the wedding reception and Emmie sits there turning green with jealousy. But then when Bastian pulls her into a side room and the director goes through the checklist of “Cue the eyes. Now the nipples! And finally, explode the pelvis!” Emmie responds but is pissed at her treacherous body syndrome and snarls at Bastian to keep his hands off her. He says something about wanting her to be like she was the previous night and she claims she was drunk the previous night. He gets pissed and categorically denies that she was too intoxicated to give consent (I agree with him). She tells him to stay away from her. That their contract has been fulfilled and they’re going to return to the office on Monday and pretend that none of this ever happened, then she goes to bed. In the morning, he sends her a text message informing her that he's made arrangements for her to leave immediately and that he won't be going with her. She does another emotional 180 and heads to his room to make peace. Instead, she finds his ex who implies that she slept with Bastian the previous night and rubs Emmie's face in Bastian's rather abrupt dismissal of her. Then there’s another jarring shift in the timeline and it's suddenly three weeks later. Emmie is in a bathroom stall at a cafe where she works and she's taking a pregnancy test that of course comes up positive. Then we get an info dump of how she moved out of her mother's house and has been crashing on a friend's couch. Bastian tracks her down and she tells him that she's pregnant and wails that she doesn't want to be. She's not ready and she can't afford it. He offers to take the baby off her hands when it's born and she does another of her now-typical 180s and insists that she does want the baby...even though she literally just said that she didn't. He offers her a place to stay and she accepts because “being homeless is scary.” Except that she’s not homeless. She knows that she can always go home to her sister, Kat’s house. So it seemed like she was being very melodramatic and just choosing to cast herself in the role of martyr. Bastian puts her up in an ultra-luxurious apartment and allegedly calls her or brings her food every day for 5 weeks that were not described in real time. Oh and he reassures her that he didn’t sleep with his ex the night of the wedding. He also opens up about his father’s 4 horrible marriages and how he never really wanted to marry anyone because of it. Now he’s stoked because he’s got a baby on the way without the hassle of a bride. Bastian does try to get Emmie into bed once at the beginning of the 5 weeks and though her Go-Go-Gadget nipples and detonating pelvis are in full effect, she says no and Bastian backs off. Then Emmie has an OB appointment and finds out she's having twins. Bastian is ecstatic. Emmie has been pretty frosty to Bastian during these 5 weeks, never letting him or herself forget that “typical shag” line that hurt her so much, but today she does another 180 and decides to be nice to him. She invites him over for dinner and greets him at the door in a fancy dress. He’s on her immediately, begging her to say yes and she does. They perform the pre-flight checklist with the eyes, nipples and pelvis and then have the earth-shattering sex again. Before they’ve even caught their breath afterward, Emmie initiates the stereotypical girl talk on “what happens now?” Bastian is irritated that she wants to have the talk right that second and gruffly tells her not to be so dramatic, it’s just sex. This sends Emmie catapulting back the other way and she turns on the Ice Queen act. Bastian knows he’s said the wrong thing but is too arrogant to take it back. Instead he casually informs her that he’s going to be leaving the country tomorrow for several months’ time but assures her that he’ll keep in touch by phone. The door has scarcely closed behind his perfectly sculpted fanny when Emmie starts packing her bags, having finally decided to go home to her sister. There’s another jarring shift in the timeline when suddenly some undefined number of “months” have gone by. The story picks up with Bastian, somewhere in Asia, finally breaking down and asking his secretary to go and check on Emmie. We’re told that “after months of unanswered calls” he’s finally gotten worried. This is COMPLETELY unbelievable. She’s pregnant with his twins! He wouldn’t have let it go more than a week without having someone check on her. Heck, a lot of romance heroes would have caught a flight back home to check on her themselves! But this is the plot we’re given. He let months go by before he became even slightly concerned. The secretary informs him that Emmie is gone but left him an envelope. Bastian is too proud to ask the secretary to just open it and tell him what it says, so it’s a good thing she wasn’t kidnapped and the envelope contained the ransom note… Eventually he turns up at the sister’s place where Emmie now lives alone because Kat has married a billionaire of her own and now lives at his house. Sapphire has married as well, to some royal sheikh and Emmie deliberately didn’t attend her wedding. She’s still wallowing in her self-pitying martyrdom and selfishly used her pregnancy as an excuse not to go because she couldn’t stand to see her twin so happy and in love when she herself was miserable and big as a house. Anyway, Bastian shows up at her door and he’s breathing fire about a lot of things. First, he’s pissed that she ran off and just left a note saying “this isn’t working for me” with no explanation of where she was going or how he could get in touch. He blasts her for being childish, throwing a tantrum and then running away and she gets hugely indignant and yells that she did NOT run away!! Even though that’s EXACTLY what she did. She pouts and says that she didn’t think she needed to say more in the note since he’d made it so clear that she was “just sex” and a “typical shag” to him. He gets really irritated and demands to know if she’s ever going to let that go and, frankly, I was right there with him. It’s just so juvenile of her to keep fixating on those two statements, as if they justify all her behavior while simultaneously wiping out all the positive things he’s done. And she admits that no, she probably won’t ever let it go, so she’s shaping up to be a real fishwife for their HEA. Then Bastian slaps a copy of a magazine down in front of her and the cover is a picture of Saffy’s wedding. He blasts her for keeping it secret that she’s got a supermodel twin sister and demands to know why. This part kind of baffled me. Why did he care that she had a famous sister? How did it affect their relationship at all? I had been expecting the twin thing to play a part in some Big Misunderstanding. Like Bastian would see a picture of Saffy kissing her sheikh and think that Emmie had run off and hooked up with some other man, but that didn’t happen. So all told, the twin thing was pointless in the story and this conversation. But anyway, with Emmie still not giving an inch, Bastian eventually confesses that to him, she’s the most attractive woman in the world and says he wants her to come to Greece with him. He’s pretty bossy about it and she gives in without much protest. Greece is glossed over with barely a few sentences that you could easily miss if you were skimming but apparently Emmie and Bastian were having a good time for a few weeks going on picnics and things. Much more page time was spent on Emmie and Saffy talking on the phone and finally patching up their estrangement, which was 100% on Emmie’s side to begin with and Saffy graciously forgave her for it without holding a grudge. During this talk, Emmie admits that she’s in love with Bastian and Saffy also clues her in to the fact that their mother did NOT pay for Emmie’s surgery, Kat took out a loan to pay for it. And for some reason Emmie’s first thought is not to call her big sister and thank her profusely for all the amazing things she’s done for Emmie that she was too self-centered to ever properly appreciate. Then Bastian goes to some charity function in London and the next day the front page of the Greek paper has a huge photo of him and his ex, laughing together. Emmie of course believes that he’s back with the ex. Minutes later, the helicopter lands and Bastian comes running over to reassure her that it’s all fake. The ex’s friends somehow digitally stitched the photo together and as soon as he saw the paper, he raced home to comfort her. Emmie is still kind of on the fence but then Bastian declares his undying love, pulls out a ring and proposes. She accepts. The end. (hide spoiler)] So yeah, this was just a badly written book. LG chose to show us all the wrong parts of the story. We spent ages alone with Emmie while she whined about what a raw deal she’d gotten in life. And the few interactions between her and Bastian were mostly fighting. I didn’t believe that either one of them actually loved the other, and I pretty much hated Emmie by the end. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
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not set
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Apr 12, 2018
|
Apr 12, 2018
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Mass Market Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 1455541672
| 9781455541676
| 1455541672
| 3.99
| 18,933
| Oct 18, 2016
| Oct 25, 2016
|
it was ok
|
I’m afraid this is another dud for Preston and Child. The book is disjointed, boring, unbelievable and doesn’t stay true to its characters’ establishe
I’m afraid this is another dud for Preston and Child. The book is disjointed, boring, unbelievable and doesn’t stay true to its characters’ established personalities. (view spoiler)[ The book begins exactly where the previous one left off. In fact, the last few pages of Crimson Shore, in which Diogenes surprises Proctor and doses him with a drug, are repeated verbatim in the beginning of this one. Proctor comes-to and races downstairs in time to see Diogenes forcing Constance into a car and speeding off. The ensuing chase, which spanned several continents, was interesting enough. I could buy that a guy like Proctor had a “bugout bag” filled with cash and other assorted survivalist essentials for just such an occasion. And I could believe his tireless pursuit to rescue Constance. What I couldn’t believe, however, was his continued assumption that Diogenes was making stupid mistakes. Everyone knows Diogenes is an evil genius who dreams up extremely complicated schemes that predict the movements of his victims to a T. So it should have been obvious to him that all of this was going according to Diogenes’s plan. Instead he allows himself to be lured into the middle of the desert, 200 miles from nowhere and stranded. This is one of the places where the book got really disjointed. After spending almost 1/4 of the book with Proctor, we then leave him in the desert, check back in once to find him in rough shape after killing two lions with practically his bare hands in a scene that probably would have been much more compelling if we’d lived through the action in real time, and then never hear from him again until the epilogue. And when he DOES show up at the end, the description of him is ridiculous. He’s covered in blood and dirt, has untreated wounds, a scraggly, unkempt beard, his clothes are in shreds and he’s missing one shoe. Question. How the $^#@ did he get home looking like that? You think he’d have been let on an airplane in that condition? Or even picked up in a taxi? Not a chance! It would have been much more believable to have shown us Proctor walking out of the desert and into the first African diner or pub or whatever before collapsing. Asking us to believe he somehow made it all the way back to not just the US but to his front door without ever stopping for rest or medical attention is just ridiculous. Anyway, while Proctor is off on his wild goose chase, Diogenes and Constance are back at 891 Riverside Drive. Constance had retreated to the underground just minutes before Diogenes showed up and with Proctor out of the way, he begins a very slow process of wooing her. (He’s also gotten rid of the housekeeper/cook by poisoning her sister) He prepares Constance rich meals and provides various alcoholic beverages, all sent anonymously down the elevator as if they’re coming from the housekeeper. Constance notices that these meals aren’t what the housekeeper would usually prepare, especially the alcohol, but still consumes everything without even phoning upstairs to confer with the woman. Then little gifts start appearing for her. A book of poetry with a page marked by the feather of an extinct bird. A flower that’s very rare and has been named after Constance. A silk screen painting that depicts her son. Constance knows that neither Proctor nor the housekeeper would ever give her such things. And what’s more, they don’t know where her son is living or what he looks like, so they couldn’t be responsible for the gifts. So she knows there’s an intruder in the basement, which necessarily means the house has been infiltrated, and yet she doesn’t do anything with that information. She doesn’t try to contact Proctor to see what’s going on. She doesn’t go upstairs to confront the person. She isn’t even really worried. This is just so completely unbelievable that it breaks the suspension of disbelief. Someone is stalking her! Someone has infiltrated her sanctuary against the world and even knows where her super-secret sleeping chamber is hidden! She should be terrified! But she’s not even a tiny bit concerned. It’s ridiculous. Then Diogenes reveals himself and professes his undying love for her. I hated everything about this plot development. In the past, Diogenes was a diabolically evil genius. A ruthless and formidable opponent. The Moriarty to Pendergast’s Holmes. In this book he became a pathetic, simpering milquetoast. It was awful. I could have bought Diogenes loving Constance in an evil way. Becoming manically obsessed with possessing her and keeping her against her will or brainwashing her into becoming his slave, etc. That would have been keeping with his character. But this pale, whiny guy who begs and pleads with Constance to show him even the slightest affection? No, this I cannot approve. Constance eventually agrees to go away with him to his private island off the coast of Florida. I pretty much figured that she was lying about forgiving him and planned on exacting some kind of revenge for the way he first seduced and then discarded her, and while that does prove to be the case, the way she went about it didn’t make much sense. Her plan was to make him think she loved him back and then at the last minute reveal she’d been faking all the while so he’d be crushed. But right from the start she’s acting pretty nasty and aloof towards him. Not sure how that’s supposed to convince him of her ardor. And then she lets herself be taken to this completely remote island that’s only accessible by the one boat they have, continues to be nasty and aloof, and then suddenly initiates unprotected sex with him. Um, what? Ick. Then the very next day she unceremoniously tells him it was all an act and she still despises him. She gleefully explains how all this was her revenge and she deliberately tried to twist the knife so that he’d feel maximum pain and humiliation…and then she ASKS HIM TO PLEASE GET THE BOAT READY TO TAKE HER BACK TO SHORE. Are you kidding me? That was her grand plan? To deliberately antagonize and betray the known psychopathic killer and then ask him for a ride back to civilization? She didn’t have a backup plan? What if he’d reacted by killing her? Or simply imprisoning her on the island? For heaven’s sake, how stupid can she be? Then, elated by her “triumph” over him, she asks him to show her what’s inside the locked building on the island that was barely mentioned before now. He agrees to take her, to “show her that last piece of his soul,” in a last-bid attempt to win her over. Excuse me? He still wants to win her love? After what she just did? This pathetic guy is simply NOT Diogenes. So they go there and suspense is built so that you think something will happen there, but it doesn’t. For example, Preston and Child make it a point to describe an old cistern filled with water that has no ladder on the inside so that if someone fell in they’d never get out. Then nothing happens with the cistern. And they describe Diogenes leading Constance into a locked room that’s pitch black and shutting the door, making you think maybe he’ll reveal some evil backup plan he had. Then he just turns on the lights and proceeds with the tour. It was all very anticlimactic. He shows her a gallery of morbid trophies he’d taken from all his greatest evil schemes, all of which revolve around getting his revenge on Pendergast. And he explains that now, instead of being a source of pride, the room represented his great shame at having been such a murdering psychopath all these decades and he uses it to keep himself on the straight and narrow. Constance basically spits on his explanation and tells him to blow it up (he’d conveniently built the walls with C-4 because, you know, evil genius). Here again, I can’t understand Constance’s thought process. She’s not only alone on this remote island with him, cutoff from any kind of help, but now she’s down in a dark subbasement where it would be incredibly easy to either kill her or lock her up forever. How can she be so cavalier about insulting him? But, like I said, nothing actually happens in this building so despite all the potential for action, they just leave after this little tour of Diogenes’s greatest hits. Outside Constance is attacked by Flavia, the woman who has been helping Diogenes since Crimson Shore. She’s nuts, of course, and fancies herself in love with the guy Diogenes always pretends to be in her presence. Petru or Peter or something like that. Once he had Constance he tried to get rid of Flavia by giving her a bunch of cash and false promises that he’d call her in a month but it was pretty clear she wasn’t falling for it. Diogenes even thought in that moment that the old him would have just killed Flavia to keep her from being a problem later on, but the new him didn’t kill people….except when he does, that is. See, he’s killed 3 people just since getting Constance to agree to go to the island with him because he needed a particular body part to synthesize the magic formula that gives her everlasting life. So the new him DOES kill when it suits his purpose, and thus leaving Flavia alive was a stupid move and nothing more than plot contrivance so she could come back in the climax to cause trouble. And so she tries to kill Constance who, despite not knowing any martial arts or knife-fighting skills while Flavia is exceptionally skilled in both, still manages to win the fight. Diogenes watched the whole thing from the sidelines, not intervening to help either woman. Pendergast finally shows up at that point, mere minutes before a huge strike team is due to arrive to find and kill Diogenes, who, you know, is still wanted for multiple murders, robberies and kidnappings. Pendergast points the gun at his brother but stops to ask Constance if she loves him. I’m not sure what he’d have done if she said yes but she assures him that no, she despises Diogenes….and then half a second later she’s begging Pendergast to spare his life because she’s “seen the seed of good in him.” WHAT? Suddenly she thinks he’s not so bad? She just pulled off this ultimate revenge game, spitting on his declarations of love! Then he stood by and did nothing while a homicidal psycho chick tried to kill her! And yet suddenly she thinks the world is a better place with him in it? That’s insane! And of course Pendergast is all too willing to allow his brother to not only live but also escape custody, even though doing so breaks a solemn oath he once took, is illegal, dishonors the memories of all Diogenes’s victims, and breaks a decades-old friendship with one of Pendergast’s former squad mates, all because “he’s my brother. You’d have to be a Pendergast to understand.” So, so, so lame. This makes absolutely no sense, on any level. After all he’s done and all he’s capable of doing to them and those they care about, and after Constance deliberately spat on his attempts to go straight, it makes absolutely zero sense for them to let him go. Maybe killing him in cold blood was a bit too much for them, but they could have at least arrested him. (hide spoiler)] And that’s the end. I hated the story for turning a formerly strong villain into a lame, lovesick, self-doubting doormat. I hated Constance’s idiotic non-plan. Pendergast himself was hardly involved in the book, despite having sufficient page time. The story as a whole lacked an overarching narrative. There was no mystery or villain to overcome, just a lot of waiting around for things to happen. I thought it was pretty terrible that Constance didn’t give Proctor even a passing thought after Diogenes admitted that he’d sent Proctor on a wild goose chase so they could be alone together. Poor man was walking barefoot across the desert while Constance was kicking back in luxurious hotel suites and island paradises! All in all, just a very poor showing in this book. Pretty much the only thing I did like was the very end, because it seems to be setting things up for Pendergast to be on his own in the next book and will hopefully start us on a completely new path, free of Diogenes and Constance. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
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not set
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Nov 28, 2017
|
Nov 29, 2017
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 1455525774
| 9781455525775
| 1455525774
| 3.79
| 12,449
| Jan 01, 2014
| Aug 05, 2014
|
it was ok
|
I'm afraid I have to agree with all the other negative reviewers out there. I mean, where to start with this book? With the hero who doesn't drive the
I'm afraid I have to agree with all the other negative reviewers out there. I mean, where to start with this book? With the hero who doesn't drive the plot and just goes along with things, even when they make no sense? With the ridiculous premise? With the surprisingly poor writing? With the rehashing of Preston and Child's personal cliches? It's hard to find a single part of this book that wasn't screwed up. (view spoiler)[ Okay, so the beginning of the book was decent, if a bit light on important backstory. I read the first Gideon Crew book a long time ago and have forgotten most of it, and haven't read the second at all so I was confused by a lot of things in the beginning. We learn from the back of the book that Gideon has a terminal condition but we don't find out what it is until a third of the way into the book. And he's taking orders from a guy named Glinn in an apparently long-standing relationship where Gideon does illegal things for Glinn without knowing why. None of this was explained so I was kind of lost at the start. Once Gideon started working on stealing a page from the Book of Kells things picked up a bit, but even that was mishandled. We spend the whole theft in the perspective of a random woman who is given a rather extensive backstory but is totally irrelevant to the book and never appears again. And Gideon's solution to stealing the page, while clever, would have completely destroyed it. So the next day when Glinn's people destroy the priceless page in order to reveal the map underneath, Gideon's outrage seems pretty hypocritical. Unfortunately, things go downhill from there. To start, the treasure map allegedly leads to a mystical plant call "the lotus" that can heal grievous injuries and even birth defects. The search for this plant is pitched to Gideon by Glinn as being this fantastic, altruistic thing. The "client" (who was very obviously Glinn himself but our supposedly super-smart hero never figured it out until it was revealed at the climax) promises that the plant will be cultivated and made into a drug that will be freely given to the people, not priced so high it can only be afforded by the ultra-wealthy. And Gideon never stops to give this notion even a moment's thought. I mean, seriously? You're going to give a drug to the entire world that will basically make everyone immortal? Does anyone else see a slight problem with this? Over-population? Starvation? There's just no way this could ever be a good thing in reality. People NEED to die, or the earth would be overrun in just a few years. But neither Gideon nor anyone else in book ever even considers this angle. The whole time, the quest to bring this drug to the populous is touted as being the "right" thing to do. And that's just the first of many things Gideon fails to think about or question in this long book. As soon as the woman, Amy, is introduced, Gideon immediately becomes a useless Beta who just goes along to get along. Amy dictates absolutely everything they do from that point on. And almost 100% of her orders put them in life-threatening danger FOR NO REASON. Seriously, this happens like 8 times. A strange boat hails them and Amy invites the people on board, insisting that it's the most prudent thing to do, and Gideon lets her have her way. The people are sketchy as hell when they come on board and Gideon wants to pull up anchor and leave but Amy dictates that they stay, insisting that their boat will be able to outrun the other one if something bad should happen. Guess what, it can't. The other people come back in the night and hold them hostage. Gideon has to figure a way out and they barely get away with their lives. Their boat is damaged and Gideon wants to call Glinn but Amy refuses, insisting that they can easily continue with the mission even with their damaged engine and a hurricane looming and the pirates still out there stalking them...and Gideon acquiesces to her, AGAIN. They head for the next landmark on the map, and have to fight big time to keep the boat from foundering in the hurricane-tossed seas. Then the damaged engines cut out and they almost capsize. Emergency repairs have to be made and they barely survive. Once again, Gideon wants to call Glinn but Amy insists they keep going...and he lets her have her way, AGAIN. They continue on to the landmark, knowing full well that the pirates will be there waiting for them, but Amy insists that they'll be able to outsmart the pirates by using the radar. Guess what, they can't. The pirates come after them and in the ensuing battle both boats sink and Gideon and Amy spend an agonizing day and night in a sea that's being ripped apart by a hurricane. Gideon is hallucinating badly from dehydration and swallowing sea water and when he finally washes up on an island shore, he can't even stand long enough to search for Amy. Eventually she finds him and when she gets him back to her little camp we see that she has already laid out all the supplies and started a fire and lots of other things that must have taken quite a while to accomplish. She did this BEFORE she went looking for him, even though they only got separated a little ways off shore so she must have known he wasn't far off. Bitch. Here again, Gideon wants to call for help but Amy insists they not...and he acquiesces to her AGAIN. And she won't even tell him WHY she's insisting. She just says vague things, like that he'll just have to trust her. WHY THE $@#% WOULD HE TRUST HER? He doesn't KNOW her! She's been secretive, bossy and aloof the whole time they've been together and virtually every one of her decisions has gotten them in mortal peril! This is just plain old bad writing. Not only is Gideon never given an adequate reason for Amy's insistence that they keep going, the reader is never given one either. There's no real justification for her determination. SHE'S not dying of some terminal condition like Gideon is. She doesn't have a sick child back home who needs the medicine or anything like that. It just doesn't make sense for her to continue to go on when with one quick phone call, Glinn could have them outfitted with a new yacht and equipment in no time. And following that, since there's no good reason for her behavior, there's REALLY no good reason for Gideon to keep agreeing to follow her. It's hard to get invested in a story when the main characters' actions make no sense. Not to mention that it made Gideon seem like a pansy for constantly giving in to her. Maybe if the writers had made Amy more likable or built more of a relationship between her and Gideon it would have seemed more plausible that he constantly acquiesced, but as it was, it just painted "LAZY PLOT CONTRIVANCE" across the sky in big neon letters. The real reason for Amy's insistence that they go on is because Preston and Child needed them to stay alone and on the quest in order to keep the plot going. Any time things are blatantly happening just to keep the plot going, you know you've got a badly written story. And this happens over and over. Later on, when they meet the natives and concoct a plan that involves one of them eating a flower that they think is the lotus in order to trick the natives into revealing the source, Amy says that she'll only agree to the plan if SHE'S the one to take the lotus. Once again, she won't give any justification for this and it makes no sense in the grand scheme of things. Gideon is the one who's dying, so it makes the most sense for him to take it. If it turns out to be this miracle cure then he'll be saved. If it turns out to be poison then, well, he only had a few more months to live anyway. But, once again, Gideon just gives into her on this without even putting up a fight. A short while later, they end up on the final island and Amy is hurt and sick with infection from her wound. Gideon spends harrowing hours climbing up and down a sheer rock face and constructing vine ropes and slings in order to get Amy to safety. This is about the fifth or sixth time they've been in life-and-death danger since the first time Amy insisted they not call Glinn for help. And yet, once again, when Gideon suggest they call, she refuses. She literally can't stand up, and Gideon nearly died saving her, but she's still being stubborn. THERE'S NO LOGIC TO THIS. Gideon finally grows a pair and calls anyway but then, despite her making her position on this matter VERY clear, he still hands her the phone when she asks for it and she promptly throws it off a cliff. It all came together to make Gideon seem very stupid and weak and the book very poorly written. We're never given an adequate justification for Amy's determination to continue. She just talks about wanting to finish the mission, rather than call for help and most likely be left out of any repeat attempts. That's not a strong enough reason for me to believe in her actions. She doesn't have anything personally at stake here, so risking both their lives over and over just seems unbelievable and selfish if her only motivation is to be able to put a check mark in the "completed mission" box. The rest of the book is a complete rehash of the last act in Still Life With Crows. Giant lumbering creature that's barely human, can only speak a few broken words, is preternaturally strong and develops a crush on the girl character because she says the word "friend"? Check. Lots of running around in dark caves for the final confrontation? Check. A dog killing? Check. (seriously guys, what is WRONG with you that you feel the need to kill a dog in every book? You seriously need to seek professional help because that is NOT normal!!!) And Gideon's behavior was just as incomprehensible and lame here as it was in the whole rest of the book. His devotion to Amy and total blindness to her behavior was just bonkers. She's been consistently acting stubborn and irrational the whole book, and yet he's surprised every time she does something crazy. And then he gives up his chance to make it to safety in order to go back and "rescue" her. I didn't see their relationship as being in a place where this would make sense. They kissed once, and even that felt like it was coming out of nowhere because there was absolutely no chemistry between them the whole story. And yet he's ready to die for her? When she's the one who put herself in danger, AGAIN? Nope, don't see it. And Amy's devotion to the cyclops was bizarre too. Yes, I get it, he's the last of his kind and should be left alone to live in peace. That's a wonderful fairy tale story for her to believe in. But here in reality, the truth is that the only way for him to be left alone is if everyone walks away and pretends they never discovered the island. And to do that, they'd have to abandon forever the quest for this life-saving medicine. A) Glinn would never allow that, B) what about all the people in the world that this medicine was supposed to help? I've already said that this idea is BS, but since everyone in the book insists it's the right thing, then Amy should recognize that abandoning the quest for the lotus isn't an option. Is she really saying that it's better for the 7 billion people on the planet to go on dying of diseases that the lotus could cure, just so that the cyclops can continue to live his lonely, dangerous existence on the island, instead of in the nature preserve Glinn is suggesting? A creature that by all rights should have died centuries ago but has been granted abnormally long life because of the lotus? And C) Glinn is right that the Nicaraguan and Honduran governments will be there in a flash to find out what the Americans are doing. And once they realize the goldmine the lotus represents, they'll lock it down and sell it for as much money as they can get. And they'll either kill the cyclops or put him in a zoo that will probably be a lot less comfortable than the nature preserve Glinn has in mind. So any way you look at this, Glinn's idea is not only the best option, it's the only option. (Incidentally, Gideon once again showed himself to be a total waste of space in this part by not taking a decisive stance one way or the other. He sort of vaguely felt that it was bad to cage the cyclops but also kind of vaguely got why it was necessary but he didn't SAY or DO anything. He didn't talk to Glinn and try to convince him to let the cyclops go and he didn't talk to Amy and try to get her to see reason. He just stood there letting everyone else decide things for him. What a terrible hero.) But anyway, Amy is so insane that she ignores all of this logical information and sticks with the "he must be set free!!!" mantra. So she lets the cyclops out and then stands by as he murders dozens of nameless red shirts who were just following orders and probably all had loving families back home. She also kept shouting about how the cyclops had saved Gideon's life, conveniently omitting the fact that he'd been the one to injure Gideon in the first place. Amy also conveniently fails to recognize that all of this is HER fault. That if she hadn't been so hell-bent on going forward, the island, cyclops and lotus would never have been found and he could have gone on living his peaceful, idyllic life. The ending was lame because Gideon was just as useless there as he'd been everywhere else. He stupidly thinks he can reason with the cyclops, even though the creature has never liked Gideon to begin with and had just tried to kill Gideon, AGAIN, because he walked in on Gideon and Amy kissing and was jealous. And directly after that the creature had been attacked by Glinn and all his men so he was like a bear with a wounded paw. But noooo, our allegedly genius level physicist hero who's skilled in social engineering thinks he can talk sense to the creature AND get it to act as a truffle sniffing pig for them to find more lotus. Right. That's totally going to happen. And it was super hypocritical of Gideon to think he could predict how the creature would behave just based on his intuition and social engineering skills, and then in the epilogue of the book totally malign Glinn for having the audacity to think HE could predict events using his computer simulation software. Gideon went on and on about what an arrogant prick Glinn was for not respecting the X factor of circumstance and human unpredictability...and yet Gideon himself had done the exact same thing. What a pompous douchebag. So Gideon goes and hides in a cave for a few hours waiting for the creature to get finished grisily murdering all of Glinn's men and blowing up the camp, setting fire to the whole island. Once all the exciting stuff is done happening elsewhere, the creature finally comes to where Gideon is hiding. Amy is there too and tells Gideon that he should run because the creature is totally out of control and will kill him. And, sure enough the second Gideon reveals himself, the creature attacks. Gideon had his rifle at-the-ready expressly for the purpose of shooting the cyclops if he was beyond reason....and then he doesn't take the shot. Why? Because he's a useless weakling hero. Instead they have the requisite chase through the dark caves that Preston and Child include in every single book and at the end the cyclops has Gideon dead-to-rights when he just decides to pack in it and commits suicide instead. Gideon didn't do a single thing to bring about the conclusion of the situation. Totally lame. The bit where Amy is ready to kill herself like the cyclops didn't move me at all. Her actions the whole book hadn't made any sense and I didn't understand her desire to die in this moment, nor did I care. Gideon's cliched "I'm dying and would love to have more time and you're ready to throw yours away" speech didn't interest me either. It was totally unoriginal and I didn't see why he cared whether Amy lived or died because there'd been no chemistry between them the whole book. Plus all the time he spent talking her off the ledge made it so that the fire closed in on them and cutoff any attempt at escape. Great job Gideon, you stopped her from jumping to her death so she can burn alive with you instead. Brilliant. But Glinn rescues them by dropping a rope ladder from a helicopter in the nick of time. Incidentally, I never understood why Glinn cared so much about Gideon. Maybe this was something the previous books established, but nothing Gideon did in this book showed him as being the least bit competent. So why a smart, wealthy, driven man like Glinn thought the sun rose and set with him was beyond me. (hide spoiler)] So all in all, the book just didn't hang together. Gideon was a complete failure as the hero, Amy was annoying, bossy, aloof and just plain nuts. Glinn acted like a jerk when a softer approach would have gotten him better results. The plot was a travesty of contrivance and lunacy, and the ending was just another stamping out of Preston and Child's usual cliches. Don't bother with this one. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Oct 27, 2017
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Oct 27, 2017
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Hardcover
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| 034548651X
| 9780345486516
| 034548651X
| 3.82
| 9,358
| 2006
| May 01, 2007
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did not like it
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I have something of an obsession with reading and writing book reviews. And as such, when I find a new author with a big backlog of stories, I often s
I have something of an obsession with reading and writing book reviews. And as such, when I find a new author with a big backlog of stories, I often scroll through their books to see how many stars they average. And when I see a book that seems to have gotten disproportionately bad reviews, I can’t help but read a few to find out why. And that was the case with Cover of Night. When I saw its low star count I read all the reviews from people saying the story was boring and unbelievable and in need of a good editor and figured I’d steer clear of this one. Well, that was several months ago and when I was ordering audiobooks from my library I’d completely forgotten about it and just requested all the Linda Howard books I hadn’t yet read. When I started listening to this one my memory was jogged but I figured what the heck? And decided to give it a shot anyway. The result is one of my rare DNFs. The entire first CD of this book is nothing but boring, repetitious filler. We’re told over and over and over about the heroine’s decision to move to the small town in which she’s currently living. How tight her finances are. How she’s far away from her family but the tradeoff is a lower cost of living. All in long passages of exposition with nothing interesting to break it up. The heroine comes across as aloof and a little stuck up. And when the hero was introduced, he was so not-hero material that I was sure he couldn’t be the hero. He’s described as being so skinny that his overalls hang off of him, so painfully shy that he can’t stammer out a sentence to the heroine without blushing like a school boy, and of such indeterminate age that the heroine at first thinks he’s pushing fifty, (though she later admits that she’d always been so needlessly aloof with him that she’d never actually looked at him closely). That’s such the opposite of what I expect in a hero that I re-read the back of the book, sure that I’d misread it the first time. And the scenes with the 4-year-old twins deserve special mention because the heroine come across as a crazy, humorless disciplinarian rather than the loving mother her inner monologue repeatedly tells us she is. She comes down on her boys like a ton of bricks for just doing normal kid play stuff and sends them to "the naughty chair" for much longer than their alleged crimes warrant or for any unsupervised 4-year-old to realistically sit through. And the constant conversations where the kids say something and replace their R's with W's and then Cate corrects them and they repeat what they said, this time with correct pronunciation were incredibly irritating to listen to and brought all pacing to a screeching halt. If I hadn’t already read the reviews for this book telling me that the rest of it is just as bad, I might have hung in there and waited to see if it got better. But everything I’ve seen up to this point says the reviews are totally, totally right. So I’m tapping out on this one. ...more |
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1
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not set
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Sep 29, 2017
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Sep 29, 2017
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Mass Market Paperback
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| 0399174486
| 9780399174483
| 0399174486
| 3.82
| 11,539
| Dec 08, 2015
| Dec 08, 2015
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really liked it
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This one was pretty good. The mystery was engaging and had enough twists and turns to keep me interested. It did get a shade unbelievable at the end,
This one was pretty good. The mystery was engaging and had enough twists and turns to keep me interested. It did get a shade unbelievable at the end, however. And I found it super irritating that Madeline was given a very obvious clue by the dying caretaker and yet insisted on brushing it off as him "hallucinating" because he was so close to death. Nothing else he'd said during that scene indicated that he was out of touch with reality so it was dumb plot contrivance for her to ignore this clue. But these are small gripes and on the whole, the mystery was good. Probably the best one JAK has ever done. And I liked the title of this book. It works on multiple levels throughout the story. The romance was pretty lacking, as per usual. At the very beginning I thought the romance between Madeline and Jack was going to be great. He was showing all the signs of being a hot, protective man who deeply lusted after our heroine while also respecting her as an equal. Madeline leaned a bit too far to the b*tchy side for my tastes, but then she found the old caretaker dying and called Jack to help her and that made her come across as a bit softer and more vulnerable. So I thought they'd end up being a great couple. But sadly my optimism was misplaced. Madeline goes back to being the over-the-top bossy executive chick almost immediately after telling Jack her deep, dark secret, which didn't make sense to me. I mean, she barely knows him, but decides to tell him about the illegal and traumatizing events of her past. Then she immediately threatens to fire him because he said something she didn't like. How can she risk firing him now that he knows her dark secret? Isn't she worried he'll retaliate by blabbing? It was weird. And their one and only sex scene in this rather long book was completely ruined by the copious amount of asinine talking beforehand where Madeline brings out the b*tch executive again to basically bully Jack into sleeping with her. Total mood-killer. JAK even put in a scene later on where Madeline and Daphne discuss it and Daphne comments that this isn't very romantic. Hanging a lampshade on it doesn't make it better, Jayne. If you realized that the sex scene was cringe-worthy, why not rewrite it so that it's good?" The secondary romance between Daphne and Abe was very poorly fleshed out, but it didn't take up too much time in the story so that's fine. And I spent the whole book confused as to why everyone kept referring to Xavier as "The Golden Boy" and talking about how his parents had expected him to be the one of the two brothers who made it all the way to the White House. For starters, he was the second son. Normally parents automatically expect the eldest son to be the high achiever. And second, from a very, very young age, virtually everyone on the island, including his family, recognized that Xavier was a psychopath. So when exactly were they pinning their hopes on his political career? When he was an infant? Had the older son, Travis, really disappointed them SO much by the age of two that they'd decided to cut their losses with him and focus on the next kid? Like I said, it didn't really make sense to me. All in all it was a sub-par romance but worth a look for the mystery. P.S. If I ever meet JAK I'm going tattoo "Frisson" on her forehead. She always slips it into every one of her books but she doubled and then tripled down in this one by having it said multiple times. I have come to absolutely hate this word, completely and 100% as a result of reading JAK's books. STOP ALREADY. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Jul 20, 2017
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Jul 20, 2017
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Hardcover
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| B00RLULO7K
| 3.82
| 44,082
| Oct 27, 2015
| Oct 27, 2015
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liked it
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I had a really hard time settling on a number of stars for this book. I liked the sparks between Kathleen and Devon and believed their attraction to e
I had a really hard time settling on a number of stars for this book. I liked the sparks between Kathleen and Devon and believed their attraction to each other, which is good, but at times I also found both of them to be despicable. I was also often confused as to how I was supposed to be feeling about a given situation because the author would steer the reader in one direction, then make an abrupt about-face, then just when I’d accepted the new path, veer off in another direction. And the resolution to how to keep the estate afloat was very Dues Ex Machina. All of which made the book not feel GOOD to me, but it certainly wasn't bad either, hence the 3 star rating. (view spoiler)[ So the story is that Kathleen is the classic virgin widow. Her hot-headed husband, Theo, went out after their wedding and got plastered before coming home to the marriage bed. He stank of booze and sweat and didn't want to do anything to prepare his innocent bride for the act, preferring that she just lay there and accept the pain as her "wifely duty." Kathleen refused him and continued to refuse him for three days. On the third day, they quarreled over the subject again and then Theo ran out to the stables and jumped on their most high-strung horse. The horse threw him and he died of a broken neck, but not before whispering to Kathleen that the event was all her fault. Kathleen was left in Ravenel house with Theo's three younger sisters. She's been insisting that the family follow all the rules of mourning that society dictates but secretly lives in fear of someone finding out that she has no actual right to be there because the marriage was never consummated. Devon was Theo's much-hated cousin and he inherited the estate and title, much to his chagrin. Devon and his brother, West, have dedicated their lives to avoiding any kind of responsibility whatsoever and this inheritance is not a joyous event for them. The Ravenel estate is virtually destitute thanks to mismanagement and inattention from generations of earls before Devon and the family home is in shambles. What’s worse, over 200 tenant farmers and their families live on the land and are in desperate need of upgrades to their properties in order to be profitable – upgrades that were promised to them by the previous earls. When Devon first learns of his inheritance he has every intention of selling off the land so he doesn’t have to be bothered with it. He goes to visit the estate and meets Kathleen and the sisters and basically makes an @ss of himself. He callously talks about his plans for selling the land and that he’ll have no compunction about tossing all four women out on their fannies because they’re nothing to him. Kathleen overhears the comment and says some scathing things to Devon. This caps off several chapters of back and forth bickering between the pair. They were fairly evenly matched and I liked that Kathleen was able to stand up to him with a clever tongue. It was tough to like Devon in this beginning part. He virtually assaulted Kathleen at their very first meeting by pinning her against the wall and forcibly raising her veil. It’s completely inappropriate for him to touch her at all but even more shocking for him to expose the face of a widow in mourning. And shortly after this incident, Kathleen walks to a farm and an unexpected rainstorm blows up. When the oldest sister, Helen, asks for permission to send a footman to get Kathleen, Devon indulges in several minutes of fantasizing about Kathleen being soaked and covered in mud because she’s such a shrew. However, this unchivalrous behavior on his part is soon contradicted when he goes after Kathleen himself, getting soaked to the bone in the process. They also soon share an unexpectedly intimate moment when Kathleen finally allows herself to cry over Theo’s death and Devon comforts her through the process. Devon is more or less infatuated with Kathleen from that moment on and that was partially to blame for his sudden change of heart and decision to keep the estate intact and work to restore it to profitability. Their relationship builds believably through mail correspondence over the next few weeks after Devon returns to London. And when they became lovers, I was happily surprised by how Kathleen handled things. Taking charge of the relationship and setting her own rules, rather than letting Devon dictate to her. However both of them grabbed the idiot/nasty ball several times throughout the rest of the book. For example, a farming couple comes by to say they saw a railroad surveyor measuring their land. Kathleen is immediately incensed that Devon might consider kicking these people off their farm in favor of routing the railroad through and fires off a scathing telegram to him. She knows he’s been working his tail off trying to turn things around at the estate and that he’s fighting a huge uphill battle that he didn’t HAVE to take on, but she doesn’t give him even the slightest benefit of the doubt. Devon, for his part, suddenly becomes ruthlessly calculating to the point of being down right evil when he schemes to basically sell Helen into marriage to one of his rich frenemies, Rhys Winterborne. Devon sees only a chance to gain significant cash for the estate, with no regard for whether Helen and Rhys would make a good couple. He says that Helen only has to go through with it if she wants to, but he knows full well that Helen is the kind of gentle woman who would willingly sacrifice her own happiness if it meant helping her family. So he’s pretty much backed her into a corner on the subject and feels absolutely no guilt over it whatsoever. And, to make things worse, he deliberately kept his plans from Kathleen because he knew she wouldn’t approve. And when she found out, rather than admit the unethical nature of his plans and maybe say he didn’t feel good about it, he chose to insult Kathleen, implying that Helen would surely rather marry the uncouth Winterborne rather than remain under Kathleen’s tyrannical thumb. The Helen-Rhys romance was one of the places where I was confused as to how to feel. In the beginning, when Helen was nursing him back to health, I thought they’d end up being a good couple. That her gentle nature would be a good counterbalance to his harsh domination. But as their courtship progressed, Rhys just ran roughshod over her with no regard for her wishes and they seemed completely opposite of each other in every subject. She hated the engagement ring he gave her. He found the lily she’d given him to be frivolous. She was so nervous around him that she could barely speak and he interpreted her silences as snobbery. So she was basically clueless and unhappy while Rhys was angry and yet still determined to possess her, both for her body and for the entrance into respectable society that she represented. That’s a pretty dysfunctional relationship. Then Rhys basically attacked her sexually, forcing aggressive kisses on her and then assuming she was again snubbing him when she didn’t know how to respond. He was a barbarian and upset her to the point where she became physically ill and took to her bed for days. Then when Kathleen confronted him about his behavior and tried to explain that Helen was an innocent and that he shouldn’t have been so aggressive with her, he made crude remarks about how if a few kisses sent her into a bedridden state then she’d never survive the marriage bed. And following that deplorable display, he made more crude remarks about how maybe he’d marry and bed Kathleen instead. Saying that she seemed “sturdier” and insisting that she’d be a fool to think Devon would ever marry her so it would be in her best interest to marry Rhys. He had Kathleen pinned against the wall and was looming over her when Devon showed up to rescue her. Afterward, when Kathleen said that she hadn’t been in any real danger from Rhys because he was Devon’s friend, Devon said “are you really that naive?” Indicating that he believed Rhys perfectly capable of raping her with no regard for their friendship. The fact that Devon believed Rhys to be that much of a monster just makes it even more despicable that he’d been ready to sell Helen to him. So all in all, when the engagement between Helen and Rhys was broken, I was happy. It was confusing that there had been such an abrupt change in the path of the romance but I was glad of it…..AND THEN the epilogue happened where we hear Helen’s inner monologue saying that she’s actually still interested in Rhys and kind of pissed off that neither Kathleen nor Devon bothered to ask her opinion before severing the engagement. Huh? Where did that come from? And I see that the next book in the series is their story. Why did the author make Rhys into SUCH a monster if she wanted him to be a hero in the next book? Like I said, I was confused. The same switcheroo happened with Kathleen and Devon with regards to the baby. They have an “accident” while having sex so now there’s the possibility of a baby. Devon reacts badly, causing an estrangement between the two. I was hoping it would turn out that there was no baby, for a change. Women in romance novels always seem to have the fertility of rabbits. And since the “accident” had been Kathleen’s fault, I felt it would make it seem like she’d been trying to trap Devon if she did come up pregnant. And so three weeks later when Kathleen told Devon she’d gotten her period, I was happy. It then also allowed Devon to come to the realization that he was actually disappointed that there was no baby because deep down he wanted to marry Kathleen and the baby would have given him the perfect excuse….AND THEN we find out that Kathleen had lied and she actually is pregnant. This was swept under the rug like it was no big deal for her to keep such a huge secret from him. Incidentally, I was also disgruntled to find that they never addressed the issue of how it was socially impossible for them to get married while she was still in mourning. After the author had spent so much time bashing us over the head with the rules of mourning and how Kathleen still had the better part of a year to go before she’d be free, then she dumps this baby on our happy couple, which thereby guarantees that they’ll have to buck convention and marry immediately, and neither of them ever mentions this fact. Elsewhere in the book there seemed to be a lot of things introduced and then just dropped. What was the point of the pig? Why make such a big deal about Kathleen being unable to cry and then have her crying at the drop of a hat for the rest of the book? Why was the horse made such a big deal of in the beginning and then barely mentioned again? And where was this allegedly famous Ravenel temper Devon was supposed to have? He was in stressful situations multiple times throughout the book and never really lost control. Heck, if a man walks in on a frenemy threatening to rape his beloved and STILL keeps his cool then I don’t think you can legally say he’s got a hot temper. Most of the romance novel heroes I’ve read who DON’T have an infamous temper wouldn’t have been able to hold back from throwing a punch in that situation. So the whole Ravenel temper thing seemed to be much ado about nothing. And finally, the fact that they found some huge deposit of very valuable ore on the property which would magically solve all their financial woes was just a huge cop out. What a load of crap. Why not have them win the lottery or find a pirate treasure while you’re at it? So lame. (hide spoiler)] So, all in all this was a confusing book. There were things I liked but also a lot of things I didn’t so it evens out to a “meh” rating. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Feb 05, 2017
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Feb 06, 2017
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Kindle Edition
| ||||||||||||||||
| 0349401780
| 9780349401782
| 0349401780
| 3.69
| 12,272
| Aug 11, 2015
| Aug 11, 2015
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it was ok
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I'm afraid I have to agree with the nay-sayers out there; Brown-eyed girl was a disappointment. (view spoiler)[ Avery is difficult to like right from th I'm afraid I have to agree with the nay-sayers out there; Brown-eyed girl was a disappointment. (view spoiler)[ Avery is difficult to like right from the start and it was incredibly hard to see why Joe was so attracted to her. At their first meeting, Avery was in unflattering clothes, with an unflattering hairstyle, no makeup, big unflattering glasses, and she was covered in dust and sweat from running around out in the Texas heat all day. In addition, she's also a self-described "big" girl and she was kind of rude to Joe by a) assuming he was the hired help and b) implying that he looked too scruffy and disreputable to even BE the hired help at the upcoming illustrious wedding. Plus she jabbered away nonstop with her insults and presumptions so that he couldn't even get a word in edgewise to correct her. What on EARTH about this meeting made Joe, who's rich, handsome and just an all around great guy, so infatuated with her that he continued to single-mindedly pursue her for the rest of the night? I didn't get it. And things only got worse from there. Avery spends the whole night telling Joe to get lost because she's not interested in dating him. And yet he doggedly continues to chase after her like some kind of masochist. Then, extremely suddenly, Avery decides they've got good chemistry and she's willing to have a one-night stand with him. I was actually happy that they just went for it. It's so cliche that 99.9% of romance novels, even those set in present day, eschew first-meeting hookups between the two consenting adults in favor of some out-dated notion that the heroine can't be a "good girl" if she actually admits she wants sex so early in the relationship. But, sadly, Kleypas fumbled this progressive plot line by having Avery turn out to be a b*tch. After their night of transcendental sex, Joe leaves but promises to call her. Avery decides in her head that he's a player and therefore he won't call her because the one night of sex was all he was after. She's assigned him the label of player simply by virtue of the fact that he a) slept with her after only knowing her a few hours (gee, pot, meet kettle) and b) had a condom in his wallet so they were able to use protection. Seeing as how every man in the history of the world ever has had an emergency condom in his wallet since puberty (if for no other reason than to delude himself into thinking a hook up might one day happen to him), I find Avery's condemnation to be pretty misplaced. And yet she inexplicably holds onto this notion even after Joe DOES call her...and continues to call for more than a week, thereby making it clear that he'd fully intended for this to be more than a one-night stand. Avery ignores his calls until she eventually clues into the fact that her ghosting routine isn't working, so she finally decides to break up with him via text message. She tells him that he was "fine for one night" but that she's not interested in a relationship. Wow. Of course, because this is a romance novel and they're the designated hero and heroine, Avery and Joe have to be brought back together by the fates. They see each other at a swanky function a week later and although Joe is angry at first, he quickly reveals he'll do anything, and I do mean ANYTHING to get her back. It was bizarre. First he rescues Avery from a vertigo-inducing floor, which was pretty bizarre all on its own, and then he pulls her into a private room and demands an explanation for why she won't go out with him. She says that their night together was nice but that he "just didn't work for her." This leads him to believe that she hadn't been satisfied during their lovemaking and he literally begs her to give him another chance. Going on and ON about how if she'd just say yes, he'd make it so good for her. He'd do ANYTHING she wanted in order to make her sexually happy. Now, when I read these books, I sometimes find it helpful to consider how I'd feel about a situation if the genders were reversed. Imagine that it was Avery who had continued to call and call after their one night together, never catching the clue that she was being ghosted. Then when Joe finally got tired of her harassment, he flat-out told her, IN A TEXT MESSAGE, that he deemed her to be nothing better than one-night stand material. Then when fate brought them together again, she begged and pleaded for the opportunity to please him in bed, in any way he wanted, if only he'd consent to take her back. We'd all say she was the most pathetic, desperate, masochistic, mentally unbalanced doormat alive and that Joe was a heartless jerk toying with her emotions. And yet, when the genders are swapped, we're supposed to find this romantic? No. Not even a little bit. Ick. About a week after the swanky party, Avery, a professional event planner, puts on a baby shower for Joe's sister, Haven. While there, one of the kids innocently asks if Avery is Joe's girlfriend and Joe says not yet because "you have to work a little harder for one of the good ones." And I was just like, WTF are you talking about? Nothing in Avery's behavior or demeanor up to that point in the book marked her as being "one of the good ones." All she's been doing is telling Joe to get lost, accusing him of all sorts of unflattering things, and going out of her way to look terrible. Exactly which one of these traits marks her as a "good one?" During the party, Avery very carefully ignores Joe so afterward he pulls her into the pool with her clothes on just to force her to look at him. Here she finally opens up to him about that time she got left at the altar and he soothes her and then starts getting her all hot and bothered. Within a matter of seconds she's so far gone that she's ready to have sex in the pool, in broad daylight, with Joe's entire family, including children, just inside. He has to be the one to call a halt and then she gets super pissed at him for winding her up and then not delivering. Frankly, I didn't understand why they didn't just go inside the giant mansion to one of the many bedrooms and finish up there, but there I go using logic and all that nonsense... After that, as others have mentioned, the story became much more about Avery's business than about the relationship with Joe. I never felt a spark between them. Joe was definitely a Beta hero to the point where he seemed like a faceless cardboard cutout. He'd decided right from the start that he wanted Avery, despite her repeated rejections, baggage, and lack of positive qualities, and he patiently waited for her to come around, all the while being the swellest guy on the planet. Not only is he handsome and rich and able to see Avery's swan under the deliberately ugly duckling, but he's also a "normal guy" who pursued a career as a photographer and went to Afghanistan at great personal risk and he volunteers on the weekends at an animal shelter. I'm sure they'll be canonizing him any day now. So yeah, Joe was a Marty Stu but it didn't really matter because he spends so little time on-screen. Avery was a study in contradictions. In the beginning, much is made of the fact that she dresses unfashionably and the reader is led to believe that she just doesn't know how to dress herself. There's the stereotypical "Cinderella" scene where she's taken out to buy new clothes and get a new hairstyle and some contact lenses. And during the clothes part she's skeptical of the brightly colored garments picked out for her. She also complains about the clothes being "too restrictive" and she's told that they actually fit her properly, she's just not used to wearing things that are her correct size. All of this comes together to paint Avery as a clueless fashion victim...AND THEN we find out she spent years working in New York as a fashion designer. WHAT??? How could someone who literally designed clothes for a living not know how to dress herself? It didn't make sense. Another contradiction, early in the book she's talking to her employee, Steven, and says that she knows he's interested in her sister, Sofia. And yet for the rest of the book while Steven displays very obvious behavior associated with his feelings for Sofia (i.e. being grouchy that she's wearing a revealing outfit, or that some other man is paying her attention, etc.) Avery's completely clueless as to why he's acting that way. The ending was pretty anticlimactic and didn't make much sense. Avery goes to New York with her biggest clients, an ultra wealthy mother-daughter pair. The daughter is pregnant and engaged to the reluctant groom who doesn't really love her but feels he needs to do right by his child. The groom just happens to be Joe's cousin, Ryan. The bride is a stereotypical bratty, entitled trust fun bimbo. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that she and her mother are trying to trap Ryan into the marriage and they're pushing for the wedding to take place as soon as possible. Now, you'd think with so much at stake that the daughter could suck it up and keep to the script for a couple of months but no. She brings her water skiing instructor boy toy to New York with her and parades him around in front of Avery. Shockingly, Avery asserts that it's none of her business if the bride cheats on poor Ryan. She assures the mother that "no one wants this wedding to go forward more than me." Wow. How heartless can you be? And before they head back to Texas, the daughter confides that Boy Toy is actually the father of the baby and that she knows Ryan will divorce her when he finds out but by then he'll be stuck paying her a big settlement. Here again, Avery says it's none of her business. Seriously. She was going to let this happen. And that was before the mother pulled her aside and threatened to ruin Avery's business if she breathed a word of it to anyone. While in New York, Avery interviewed for a job as the hostess of a reality TV show about wedding planning. She claims this has been her dream all along. It will require her to move up to New York, leaving her sister, friends and business behind, not to mention Joe. After the interview goes perfectly, she calls Joe and asks if he'd be willing to move to New York so she could have the dream job and him too. Here again we have Joe being the perfect Marty Stu Beta hero. He refuses to sway Avery one way or the other about the job. He says he wants her to be happy so he won't stand in the way of whatever decision she makes. I guess this is supposed to be a positive thing about Joe. That he recognizes Avery has the right to pursue her own dreams and he shouldn't try to prevent it but, damn, it's seriously unromantic. Can't he put up just a little bit of a fight? The only thing Joe does say is that he's not willing to do a long-distance relationship and won't move to New York either. Avery demonstrated that she was pretty self-centered in her thinking by claiming that there was "nothing" tying him to Texas. You know, except for his entire family, friends and job...They hang up from the conversation with Avery basically having said that she was taking the job and Joe basically having said that meant they wouldn't be a couple anymore. She flies home with the mother and daughter and without any internal soul-searching or anything else happening, magically when her feet touch Texas soil Avery knows that the TV show is no good for her and she wants Joe instead. And that she's going to tell poor Ryan that he's being cuckolded and suckered into a phony marriage. It was so abrupt that it just didn't feel satisfying. Nothing had changed since the phone call with Joe and we didn't get to read about any internal battle she had with herself, etc. So it felt like a "I've changed my mind because we're nearing the end of the book and this is a romance novel so of course I have to choose the guy" ending. (hide spoiler)] All in all it was a poorly written story. Multiple things contradicted each other and the main characters were weak. Avery was unlikable as the heroine and Joe was just too boring and beta for my tastes. Oh, but I will say that I liked Avery's "voice." The off-the-wall sayings she used were funny. Also, I listened to this in audiobook and the narrator did a great job bringing the voices to life, especially Sofia's. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Feb 2017
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Feb 06, 2017
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Paperback
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| 0373778317
| 9780373778317
| 0373778317
| 3.99
| 2,586
| Aug 15, 2013
| Dec 31, 2013
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did not like it
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I seriously cannot believe how many positive reviews this book has gotten. This was one of the worst books I've ever read! There's zero foundation for
I seriously cannot believe how many positive reviews this book has gotten. This was one of the worst books I've ever read! There's zero foundation for the romance, the heroine was a blithering idiot and no one behaved in a believable manner. What the heck do all these other reviewers see in it?(view spoiler)[ This book is part of a series and I haven't read any of the other books so maybe there was some background with the hero and heroine given in those books that I missed, but if that's the case, it just underlines the fact that this is a badly written story. You should be able to pick up any book in a series and at least get the basics of what's going on. In Big Sky Secrets, we've got Ria and Landry, who have apparently never spoken a word to each other prior to this book, and yet Ria holds an inexplicable hatred for him. The story opens with Ria finding Landry's herd of 2 whole buffalo tramping around her front yard, eating her flowers. She calls Landry's house to insist he come to collect the wayward beasts. It takes Landry an hour to get there and Ria sits stewing the whole time about what a terrible person he is. She thinks about how he's rich and therefore arrogant, spoiled and incapable of sympathizing with regular people's problems. She's so sure of her assessment of him that she vows to stay inside, pretending not to be home just so she won't have to speak to him. The whole time she's fuming I assumed we'd learn that she had some justification for feeling this way. That we'd get to hear about some incident where it seemed like Landry was a jerk but it would later turn out to be a misunderstanding...but we don't. As far as I can tell, there IS no event that caused Ria to form this opinion. I didn't get it. The fact that Ria was passing such a harsh judgement for no reason makes her a bad person. Then she does go outside and is very hostile toward Landry. But instead of focusing her irritation on the fact that this is now the sixth time his bison have destroyed her yard, she blathers on with irrational attacks on him personally. She accuses him of not recognizing that the flowers the animals destroy are her livelihood...even though he did nothing to indicate that's how he felt and had already promised to reimburse her for any damages. Then she makes another irrational leap to demand to know why he can't just raise cows like everyone else..because somehow it would be better if his herd of cows rather than buffalo were eating her plants? Like I said, she was totally irrational. The next morning, Landry comes by to find out in the light of day how bad the damage to her crop is and Ria starts attacking him again. She seems genuinely disappointed that the damage isn't worse because that would give her a stronger justification for her rude behavior. Landry finally comes straight out and asks why she hates him so much, and this is where I expected to hear about whatever misunderstanding was hovering in their past. Instead, Ria fumbles around, completely unable to think of even one legitimate reason for her irrational hatred. Finally she stamps her foot and shouts that his major crime is that he's too good looking. Seriously, this woman is a psycho! Then Landry catches the crazy bug as well because he suddenly finds this insane woman so inexplicably attractive that he kisses her right then and there. These are two people who, as far as we know from this book, haven't spoken more than a passing sentence to each other and 100% of those exchanges have been hostile...and he kisses her? Real people do not behave this way! Then Landry asks Ria out on a date to the "Boot Scoot" tavern. Ria agrees, but only to try to prove some kind of a point to Landry. She feels that he "won" something by kissing her and eliciting a response and she can't let that stand. Fast forward a couple of days and Ria's niece, Quinn, shows up. This side plot with Quinn and Ria's half-sister was barely explored and seemed to only serve to pad out the page count. But anyway, while Ria is driving Quinn in the car, she's suddenly so completely overwhelmed by the several-years-old death of her cheating husband that she has to pull the car over and have a breakdown. I didn't understand why she was still so hung up on this guy when she went on and on in her mind about how she hadn't really been in love with him by the end because his cheating had broken her trust. But I really didn't understand why, years later, the dam suddenly broke during this car ride. Naturally Landry finds them on the side of the road and carries Ria back to his truck for the ride home. Everyone in the story seems to feel Ria's behavior is perfectly understandable for some strange reason. And during this drive home, Landry realizes that he's starting to fall in love with Ria. WHAT?! They don't even know each other! She's been hating him for no reason, they shared one kiss, and now he's found her blubbering on the side of the road. How can he possibly think he's falling in love with her??? She's a freaking mess! A few days later, it's time for their big date and Ria again acts like an insane person. She knew where they were going and yet when they get there she has some kind of nervous breakdown, AGAIN, and for no reason. It's a freaking cowboy bar not Buckingham Palace and yet she's so nervous to be there that she's completely out of her mind. She keeps referring to the bar as "wonderland," as in Alice In Wonderland, and she proceeds to start guzzling beers to help with her nervousness. She even thinks in her inner monologue about how she never drinks so she knows she's got zero tolerance for alcohol but proceeds to drink 3 giant tankards full in the space of a few minutes. All the while she's blathering on in her inner monologue about how the Boot Scoot is Wonderland and all sorts of other nonsense. One thing we do NOT hear about, however, is her and Landry having any kind of conversation whatsoever. As far as I can tell, they sat there in total silence while she chugged the booze. They take a turn on the dance floor and finally Landry calls a halt to the spectacle and pulls Ria outside to get her some coffee and take her home. On the drive she starts crying, again, and then has to ask him to pull over so she can puke. He does and helps hold her up while she's puking....and as this is happening, he's actually thinking lustful thoughts about the way her warm skin feels against his. Are you kidding me? Has there ever been a less appropriate time to feel turned on by someone? And then, as they continue driving back to her place, and she's a puke-stained, mascara-streaming, sobbing mess, Landry's thinking about how he has indeed fallen in love with her. WHAT?!?! HOW IS THAT POSSIBLE? They STILL haven't had a single meaningful conversation and she's still acting like a crazy person!!! Landry is also berating himself for taking her to the Boot Scoot that night. He somehow feels like he's completely to blame for her current state. That he should have somehow known that this adult woman would be so terrified of being in a cowboy bar that she'd lose her ability to control her own drinking and get trashed. Cuz, you know, that makes sense. And he's terrified that she'll never forgive him for this alleged infraction and that he'll have lost his chance with his one true love. Is everyone in this book taking crazy pills??? As they near the end of the drive to her place, Ria decides in her head that she wants Landry to spend the night. And she's pissed that she'll have to talk him into it because he'll have some dang fool notion that she's too drunk to give consent and insist on doing the noble thing. But, despite the fact that she just threw up on the side of the road, she insists to the readers that she's stone-cold sober...riiiight. Back at her place, Ria asks Landry to stay and then heads for the shower. When she gets out, she is totally committed to disabusing him of this harebrained idea that he shouldn't sleep with her while she's so drunk....and yet decides that the best thing to do to convince him she wants sex is to first put on her dead husband's wedding band, and then an over-sized sweatshirt from an ex-boyfriend from college. Right, that's totally the outfit that will convince this man you're in your right mind and truly want sex with him. When she gets out, does she try to explain to him that she knows he thinks she's too drunk to give consent and that he's trying to do the right thing, but that she really is in her right mind? Or that she really wants to sleep with HIM, Landry, not just some faceless guy because she's still hung up on her dead husband? NOPE! She asks Landry to hold her for a while "so she won't feel so lonely" which is basically the definition of "virtually any guy would do right now." Landry reluctantly agrees and holds her for a time, all the while regaling the readers with descriptions of how rock-hard his erection is because this weepy, drunk, crazy woman is apparently his brand of heroin. They talk a little about their respective ex's and Ria keeps fixedly asking Landry if he ever cheated on his ex-wife. He notices but doesn't put it together that the reason she's so interested is because her late husband cheated on her. Eventually Ria tries to seduce Landry, and then she gets pissed at him when he won't give in. She goes on and on about how he's not treating her like an adult woman who is capable of making decisions for herself which, quite frankly, she ISN'T. I found it really hard to reconcile the author's point in this scene. It seemed like she really expected us to side with Ria here. Like we were supposed to feel Landry was being anti women's lib or something for NOT taking advantage of the crazy drunk woman. It was bizarre. Finally Landry calls Ria on the fact that she's still hung up on her dead husband and she gets pissed and tells him to leave. He does, all the while lamenting the fact that he's probably lost Ria forever because of his ill-conceived idea of taking her to the Boot Scoot. The next morning, Ria wakes up and proceeds to puke for a very long time. Which, I'd like to point out, only proves that she was, in fact, completely plastered the night before when she was insisting she was "stone-cold sober." So all that nonsense from the night before was just a completely crazy waste of time. Landry shows up to try to make her breakfast in the hopes that he can somehow salvage a relationship with this batsh*t insane woman that he's inexplicably drawn to despite STILL never having had a rational conversation with her. Ria is extremely hostile toward him for no damn reason and he happily takes her abuse. Eventually she joins him for a horseback ride that lasts over an hour. Presumably they had some conversation during this ride but you'd never know it from the book because the author doesn't bother to describe the scene for us. When they part company, Landry heads back home and is greeted by his butler, Highbridge, who happens to be Ria's friend and is possibly nursing a May-December crush on her. He, in a very proper and British way, basically accuses Landry of deliberately getting Ria drunk so he could get her into bed. And yet, after making this thinly veiled accusation, he goes on to say that he actually thinks Landry is a great guy. Those two things are mutually exclusive, so if the butler really does think Landry's a great guy, then he shouldn't have even entertained the idea that he'd be a date rapist. It was a weird exchange but the summary is that Highbridge, too, feels Landry was somehow responsible for Ria's crazy binge-drinking the night before because she's "a lady" and therefore Landry should have known not to take her to the Boot Scoot. Right, cuz it's not like "the lady" could have just said no or anything like that. She was totally powerless in this situation and Landry is solely responsible... Highbridge also clues Landry in to the fact that some photos of Ria in her inebriated state have turned up on social media. He's helpfully compiled a list of the many, many links to multiple photos and even videos of Ria looking trashed and Landry carrying her off to the truck. I'm just going to have to go ahead and call BS on this whole story line. Ria is not famous. Landry is not famous. There is absolutely ZERO chance that a bunch of random strangers at a bar would be sooooo fascinated by the sight of a drunk woman that they'd spend their night chronicling her every drunken sway and slurred facial expression and then rush home on a Saturday night to plaster the information on the internet. NO ONE CARES! It's a bar, they see drunk people all the time. Ria is not some rare and exotic specimen that would capture everyone's interest. Not to mention that Ms. Miller apparently has no idea how social media works because by the next morning not only has literally everyone in town seen these photos and videos, but many of them have commented on what a coward the anonymous poster is for attacking poor, sweet, wholesome Ria. How on Earth did everyone in town see this so quickly?? Where exactly were the photos posted? Someone's facebook page? Were they tweeted? Either way, the only way anyone would have seen them within hours of posting is if they were already friends with/followers of the poster, but we're supposed to believe it was all an anonymous attack from an unknown party. Oh and Ria's reaction was bizarre too. She acted like she deserved to face some kind of public censure for her horrible sin of getting drunk at a bar. Oh, the horror! Might as well fit her for a scarlet letter right now. This whole subject was ridiculous crap. And it never went anywhere in the story anyway so that made it a total waste of time. After this...basically nothing happens, at least on the romance front. Landry's deadbeat dad shows up for about five minutes and then leaves without causing much of a fuss. This too was talked up like it would be a big part of the story but then goes no where. Landry goes for a horseback ride to clear his head after speaking with the old man and Highbridge gets so worried that he calls Landry's brother. The brother stops by Ria's house to see if Landry is there. When the brother moves on to keep searching, Ria prepares to sit up all night because she couldn't possibly sleep a wink now that she's so worried about this man she barely knows and has been acting crazy and/or hostile toward for the last week. Landry is found, safe and sound, and he stops by Ria's on his way home to let her know she can stop worrying. She's pretty hostile toward him again, stating in no uncertain terms that he is NOT invited to spend the night. Next chapter Ria and Quinn are again in the car and Ria has another breakdown for no reason. Meredith calls Quinn and says that she's coming to Three Trees to visit for a while. This news causes Ria's knees to quake and other assorted things that make it physically dangerous for her to be driving. WTF? This is a grown woman who has dealt with her annoying but not dangerous half-sister all her life, why is the news that she's coming to town cause for such a complete breakdown?? Yet again, Quinn steps up and acts like the grown up in the situation and yet somehow sees nothing amiss with Ria's behavior. Then out of nowhere the author pulls an impending rodeo out of her butt and has Landry hell-bent on participating in the bronco riding competition because of reasons. He goes to his brother's ranch, where his sister-in-law takes the opportunity to reprimand him for daring to take Ria to the Boot Scoot because she too feels that Ria was powerless to control her own actions and that Landry is solely to blame. Then Landry's brother ties to talk him out of competing and Landry insists this is just something he's got to do, despite him only having been a cowboy for a year and having almost no experience riding broncos. When Ria hears the news that Landry is putting himself in such grave danger she rushes to the rodeo and watches desperately as he rides his 8 seconds because, of course, she's realized that she's head-over-heels in love with him. Um, WHAT? These two have had almost no interaction with each other and know almost nothing about one another. How are we supposed to believe they're in love? When Landry sees Ria at the side of the rodeo pen, she very deliberately takes off her husband's wedding band and puts it in her pocket. Landry is so overjoyed that she's finally decided to let go of her dead husband that he doesn't even wait to see his score. He vaults over the fence, grabs Ria by the hand, and drags her straight back to his house to have sex. After having nothing but a few brief kisses in the rest of the book, it was pretty shocking to have such a very, very long and drawn out sex scene shoved into the last few chapters of the book. And just when you think it's over, they start again. I normally prefer my romance novels come with a few good sex scenes but in this case I really wish they'd skipped it. Since I didn't see any foundation for the romance, I didn't feel their desire for each other and thus it made listening to the over-long sex scenes on the audiobook kind of squicky. Just before they do the deed, Landry tells Ria that by having sex with him, she's essentially entering into a binding legal contract to marry him. He says that this isn't the start of an affair, or or a fling or a one-night stand, etc. It's the start of "forever" and if she won't commit to forever right that second then she'd better just leave and never come back. That's insane. They've only been on speaking terms for a week! And haven't had any meaningful conversations. It would make sense for them to date for a while before deciding to commit to "forever." But, since nothing about this book/relationship makes sense, Ria agrees to forever. The next morning over breakfast Ria asks what's next and Landry says they'll be getting married ASAP. Ria balks and tries to get him to agree to a REALLY long engagement or just dating but Landry won't hear of it. And in order to convince her, he says that she's most likely pregnant already. Ria is shocked because they used condoms, and Landry reveals that he'd "run out" of condoms partway through their marathon night of sex and that he'd just carried on without them and without telling her. That is a gross violation of trust! He should not have just arbitrarily made that decision for her. What if she didn't want kids? What if she had an STD she hadn't told him about? It is NOT okay for him to have taken this decision away from her. But instead of getting pissed, Ria allows him to use this information to essentially force her into agreeing to get married ASAP. Then, and I'm not making this up, Landry gets up and starts clearing the breakfast dishes and Ria marvels over this amazing display. A man, carrying dishes? Amazing! And she goes way over the top complimenting him on this unbelievable feat and says that he always does everything right. Yep, this just confirms my original impression, Ria is completely nuts. Impregnate me without my consent? No big deal! Pick up a dish and carry it to the sink? OMG CALL THE NEWSPAPERS!!! Three days later, Landry and Ria marry. Their entire relationship has spanned about 2 weeks at this point, and they've still never really spent any time together or had a meaningful conversation, but that's okay, they're in lurve! What nonsense. (hide spoiler)] So to summarize, there was absolutely no basis for the relationship, the heroine was totally nuts and I guess the hero was too since his was so enamored with the crazy woman, the side plots went absolutely nowhere and none of the characters behaved in a reasonable manner. I don't understand what everyone else sees in this book. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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not set
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Nov 16, 2016
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Mass Market Paperback
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| 0373732147
| 9780373732142
| 0373732147
| 3.74
| 301
| Nov 27, 2012
| Dec 04, 2012
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liked it
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This book started out great. I liked Laylah and Rashid and really believed their romance. The backstory of Laylah having been in love with Rashid sinc
This book started out great. I liked Laylah and Rashid and really believed their romance. The backstory of Laylah having been in love with Rashid since childhood was good and the passion that flared between them was steamy. For the first 2/3 of the story, they're deliriously happy and so in love that everyone who sees them can tell it's the real deal. Everything is going so well that you can practically hear a voice shouting "TRAGEDY STRIKING IN 10..." Of course there has to be a Big Misunderstanding that wrecks everything. I'm not a big fan of this particular writing trope but I found it to be especially irksome in this book. Rashid has a secret that honestly isn't even really a secret. It's something he'd PLANNED to do, but then never did because he fell in love with Laylah. But he worries that Laylah would turn from him if she ever learned of his aborted plans. Then comes a time, just before their wedding, when Laylah insists on going to see her pit viper of a mother, who is living in exile because of some dastardly deeds in previous books. Rashid seems to know that Laylah's mother will somehow realize and reveal his secret and tries to persuade Laylah not to go....but it never occurs to him to just come clean with her. It doesn't make sense. If he knows the cat will be let out of the bag, he's way better off being straight with Laylah than letting her find out from such a hateful source. Laylah doesn't fare much better in this Big Misunderstanding. Even though her mother has been cruel her whole life, Laylah immediately takes the woman's hateful words to heart and distrusts the man she has supposedly loved since she was four years old. Then she comes back and confronts Rashid. He, in what can only be described as convenient plot contrivance, suddenly becomes so tongue-tied that he can't muster even a single coherent sentence to defend himself. He confirms that what the mother said was, indeed, his plan and then that's about it. He doesn't try to explain WHY he'd made those plans originally, or get even the slightest bit angry that Laylah could doubt their connection is genuine after the month they've spent together in blissful happiness. No, he just lets her go on saying that he's a terrible, manipulative demon who, in her words, has degraded her far more thoroughly than the would-be rapists he'd saved her from at their initial meeting. Which, quite frankly, is a little over-the-top and insensitive for the author to say. For the rest of the book, Rashid is essentially passive. He allows Laylah to dictate their interactions, or lack thereof. He doesn't make much of an attempt to get through to her, but the few things he does do, Laylah turns her nose up at. She insists that they're all just more evidence of him being a master manipulator. Even when he gives up the one thing she thinks he's done everything for, she still insists it's all part of some devious master plan. It really doesn't make any sense. Practically her entire family is trying to convince her that Rashid genuinely loves her, and she ignores it all. Eventually she turns up pregnant and is forced to marry him so their child will be legitimized. He essentially lays his soul bare AND emasculates himself in front of the entire wedding reception and STILL Laylah refuses to budge an inch. Again, this doesn't make sense. If her accusations had been correct, then once they were married, he would have accomplished his goal and thus would have no need to court her favor. So her insistence that his doing so is all part of his master plan just doesn't ring true. Throughout this whole part of the book, Rashid frequently thinks in his inner monologue, and says out loud to members of Laylah's family, that he'd do anything for her. That she superseded everything else. His honor, his word, his fortune, everything was secondary to her happiness. And once she hates him, that he do or give anything to get back in her good graces...And yet the ONE thing that would convince her of his innocence, he refuses to do? Yeah, I'm calling BS on that. Of course it's dressed up as him being the ultimate in chivalry, that he won't poison her mind with the terrible truth, but come on. They're both miserable and it's within his power to rectify that. If her happiness is truly the most important thing to him, keeping her in the dark shouldn't have been an option. Like I said, the last 1/3 of the book just felt artificially contrived to me. Rashid's inability to speak when she's wrongly condemning him, then his refusal to tell her the one truth that could end their feud, it just felt fake. No man in real life would keep quiet like that, not when allegedly his very soul is dying at her loss. And the fact that the people who did eventually tell Laylah this secret truth, waited until the end of the book to finally decide to clue her in, it was all just too convenient. Like the author said, "well, that's enough angsting, time for the big reveal to happen." And, for the record, this secret truth didn't actually do anything to clear Rashid of Laylah's original charge. If anything, the secret truth just gave him an even stronger reason for executing the plan she was accusing him of. But, of course, we're not supposed to think about that so they can live happily ever after. Aside from those problems, I also had an issue with the writing/editing. The author used the word "deluged" way, way, WAY too often. Seriously, was this on her word-of-the-day calendar or what? "Laylah deluged Rashid in kisses." "His body was deluged with pain," etc.. Over and over it was used. And for me this was made infinitely worse by the fact that the audiobook narrator didn't know how to pronounce the word. She kept saying "da-luged" instead of the proper "del-uged". It just really yanked me out of the narrative every time it happened...which was seriously like eight times. The audiobook in general was kind of a mixed bag. I thought the narrator's pronunciation of the foreign words in the story was good and added to the immersion. But there were also a bunch of places where there were long breaks in the narration for no apparent reason, like they did a poor job splicing the recordings together or something. It happened in the middle of dramatic scenes and was very distracting. So, all in all, this one started out good, but really fell apart in the last 1/3. There was literally nothing preventing the happily ever after besides our hero and heroine's stubborn pride and that's irritating. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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not set
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Jun 26, 2016
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Mass Market Paperback
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| 0345486560
| 9780345486561
| 0345486560
| 3.78
| 8,149
| Jul 07, 2009
| Jul 07, 2009
|
liked it
|
This was a pretty middle-of-the-road book. The premise was great, but the delivery just didn't live up to that potential. I had trouble connecting wit
This was a pretty middle-of-the-road book. The premise was great, but the delivery just didn't live up to that potential. I had trouble connecting with both the main characters and their romance felt unfounded. So while there wasn't anything about the book that really pissed me off, there wasn't anything I loved either so it averages out to a "meh" rating. (view spoiler)[ The story opens with us in the heroine, Jenner Redwine's (what a ridiculous name) head as she's forced to participate in a spectacle being perpetuated by her kidnappers. After the big scene, she's then man-handled out on the deck of a cruise ship and forced to kiss her captor, who grinds his erection against her and reminds her that her friend's life depends on her cooperation, while Jenner whimpers in fear and thinks about how disgusting he is. That really, really starts things off on the wrong foot as far as the romance goes. The man who is so unceremoniously grinding up against her and insinuating that he'll happily rape her if the mood strikes him is none other than our hero Cael Traylor (also a completely ridiculous name, and spelling. Seriously, why couldn't it have just been spelled Kale? And Traylor? As in, trailer trash? It was just all wrong). Anyway, this opening scene makes Cael seem like the lowest scum on the planet, and then the book jumps back 7 years and we have no choice but to hold onto that negative opinion of him for about a hundred pages. We read all about Jenner's humble beginnings and how she hit the lottery and it completely changed her life. I found this section of the book interesting by itself, hearing about how everyone in Jenner's life basically turned on her after she became rich, but in terms of the flow of the book, it was completely unnecessary. This was a really long section that ultimately didn't have anything to do with the story we were there to read. It honestly should have been cut out altogether. And it's not like this part was needed to pad out the page count, the book was plenty long enough without it. Anywho, Jenner now only has one real friend, Sydney, and they plan to go on a charity cruise on the newly minted, ultra-luxurious Silver Mist's maiden voyage. Little do they know, one of the ship's owners, a man named Larkin, is a dirty guy who has dastardly plans for this cruise. Cael is some kind of mercenary who frequently gets hired by the US government for various jobs but without any kind of official connection. He and his team contrive to get the stateroom next to Larkin's so they can spy on him and figure out his dastardly plans. Only Larkin didn't get to his position of evil dominance by being stupid, and at the last minute he switches the room assignments around so that Jenner and Sydney have the room next to his. Hence, Cael and his team dream up this scheme to kidnap both women and hold them in separate locations so that the threat of the other's safety will keep each woman in line. Sydney just has to basically sit around and stare at the wall for two weeks, but Jenner has to convince everyone on the ship that she and Cael have fallen in love at first sight and begun a whirlwind romance to give him an excuse to be in her room. So here's my question: since Cael and his team are on official government business, even if they themselves don't work directly for any of the 3-letter agencies, why was kidnapping their only option? Couldn't their government contacts have sent a few men in black suits to wave their badges around and tell Jenner her help was needed on a matter of national security? I mean, Jenner would have been a lot more compliant all through this ordeal if she'd realized from the start that Cael and his team were the good guys. But since they did everything they could to convince her they were heartless criminals, she spent half her time paralyzed by fear and the rest so pissed off that she went out of her way to antagonize them and ruin their plans. This was ridiculous. And that kind of sums up 90% of the book from that point on. Cael keeps Jenner on a very tight leash, handcuffing her to the chair, or to him at all times unless they're in public. And when they're in public, he keeps a "warning grip" on her arm and forces her to kiss him and do other things to prove they're madly in love. Meanwhile, Jenner does everything she can to be as annoying as possible. She whines, she complains, she hits, kicks and bites, and she just plain never shuts up. I started out sympathizing with her for the rotten position she found herself in, but before long I just got so tired of her crap that I stopped caring. Cael was equally uninspiring throughout this whole period. Many times he goes out of his way to be nasty, just so he can reiterate that he's the boss and she's powerless against him, which I thought was pretty awful of him. He even admits once in his inner monologue that if their positions were reversed, he'd be just as pissed as she was because he hated being powerless.....but right after that admission he goes right back to treating her like crap. The result was that I didn't particularly like either character. I didn't hate them, I just didn't care about them getting together. Which is good because when they DO get together it's completely unfounded. Howard went to a lot of trouble to remind us again and again that Cael had never actually hurt Jenner, and that he is so smoking hot that people stop in the street to stare at him. I guess that's supposed to be all we need to declare him a prince among men so of course Jenner falls in love with him. I just didn't see it. The way the book was written, we got pages and pages of Jenner acting like a brat and Cael a jerk, and basically none of them having any kind of positive interaction. Then suddenly Jenner decides she's just gotta have him? Huh? We're told through a quick inner monologue that several days pass during which Jenner is being more cooperative and less annoying, and I guess that's when these tender feelings were supposedly developing, but we don't live through that in real-time the way we did the brat/jerk period. So the reader is left kind of in the dark as to how all this came about. I also think we needed more time spent in Cael's perspective when he was having positive thoughts about Jenner. 90% of the story is in Jenner's perspective so it made it seem like she was having a one-sided relationship. The few times we are in Cael's head, about 4/5's of it is when he's thinking about how annoying Jenner is. The few things he says that are semi-positive seem to focus an awful lot on her tiny yet somehow still drool-worthy boobs. We don't see him thinking about how he admires her spirit or personality, etc.. And when they finally start to get romantic, it just feels like it's coming out of no where. Jenner asks, for about the millionth time, that Cael let her in on what's going on and he again refuses. She calls him "numb nuts" (one of her favorite terms for him that is both dated and feels wildly inappropriate for the situation. I mean, it's like watching an R-rated movie that's had the curse words dubbed over so the hardened criminals are all saying "shoot" and "gosh darn it." I didn't understand why she wouldn't just call him an @sshole or something when Howard thought nothing of dropping the f-bomb other places in the story) But after that stellar interaction, three minutes later, Jenner's throwing herself at him. Not only did it not make sense for where their relationship stood, it really didn't make sense in the scene. Likewise when they finally slept together. Cael accuses Jenner of having some kind of Stockholm syndrome and says they can't get involved while in their current situation. She goes to bed pissed off and then hours later he comes to bed naked, says "my turn" and just straight up screws her with almost no foreplay or preparation. Huh? What changed? Why is he suddenly okay with sleeping with her? And why does it have to be in such a brutal manner? This is a place where we really needed to hear Cael's internal monologue so we could understand what he was thinking. If we'd gotten to read about him sitting up all night, fighting his desire for her and ultimately caving, then it would have made some sense, but in the absence of that explanation, it just feels like it's coming out of nowhere. And once they'd slept together, I didn't understand why Cael STILL refused to tell her what was going on with Larkin! Come on, where's the sense in that? You trust her enough to sleep with her, but not enough to explain the mission she's been unwillingly dragged into?? I think one time there was a brief throw-away line about how she'd be safer knowing less, but that just doesn't wash in this scenario. Because Jenner has been so obviously involved with Cael, if he and his team are found out, she would be right in the cross-hairs along with them. No one would believe she'd been an unwilling participant in their spy-scheme so she's better off knowing what she's up against. The final climax of the story felt unsatisfying as well because no one really behaved in a way that made sense and Jenner was about as useful as a bump on a log. After being told the whole book about how tough Jenner was, I expected her to do something in this final scene that showed everyone how much more useful she could have been to them all along if they'd let her in on their plans. But she didn't. She didn't do anything, really. So that was a let-down. And as for Cael and his team, considering the incredibly tight timeline they were dealing with and the threat they were facing, I didn't see the benefit in their deck-by-deck search. It was unnecessarily dangerous and ultimately served no purpose. So it felt like Howard was just artificially trying to up the tension instead of finding a way to achieve it organically. Although I did like the way she handled the villain's final scene. (hide spoiler)] All in all it could have been a great story but instead was just okay. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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not set
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Jun 26, 2016
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Hardcover
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| 0373178255
| 9780373178254
| 0373178255
| 3.68
| 134
| Jan 01, 2012
| Aug 14, 2012
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did not like it
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This book just didn't resonate with me. I wouldn't quite say that it's a bad book because I'm sure some people would think it was great, but I couldn'
This book just didn't resonate with me. I wouldn't quite say that it's a bad book because I'm sure some people would think it was great, but I couldn't connect with it. The characters didn't feel real and their actions rarely made sense. And I must say that this is the first romance novel I've ever read where I was screaming "please don't describe the sex scene, please don't describe the sex scene" over and over in my head. Despite the fact that Tom was an uber in-shape ex-Navy SEAL and Caitlin was an allegedly drop-dead gorgeous ex-ballerina, the pair of them had about as much sex appeal and sizzle factor as a couple of rocks. And for me, the idea of listening to the audiobook narrator describe their lovemaking ranked right up there with watching my grandparents get it on. As a general rule, if I'm that skeeved out by the idea of my hero and heroine hooking up, then we're not talking about a good reading experience. (view spoiler)[ Okay so we've got Tom who is dealing with some issues resulting from an explosion that occurred on his last mission. His hearing was damaged in such a way that he'd never be able to pass the physical required by the SEALs so now he trains recruits for a living. He also lost a man on this mission and is allegedly haunted by the knowledge that he and his team broke one of their sacred covenants to never leave a man behind. This part of Tom's past was never adequately explained. Did they fail to recover the dead man's body? Is that what he means by "leaving a man behind?" And if so, why? The description we get of the mission is that everything was going like clockwork when a bomb suddenly exploded. There's no talk of them having to evacuate under heavy enemy fire afterward, etc. So how and why did they "leave a man behind?" And what exactly was Tom's role in this? Was he unconscious at the time from his own injury? Did he give the order to leave the man behind? I just wasn't clear on what this part of the backstory meant. And quite frankly, Tom was WAY more upset about the fact that he couldn't be a SEAL anymore than he was about his dead buddy. He mentioned once that he would always wonder if there was something he should have done differently or some detail he should have noticed that would have prevented the explosion and subsequently the man's death, but 90% of his angsting throughout the whole book was about his forcible change in professions. Heck, he never even thought of the dead guy by name!!! It was always "a man" or "his man," never "Johnson" or whatever. It made the whole dead soldier aspect of this backstory feel very superficial to the point where I thought it should have been cut out altogether. It didn't really affect the story and it felt down right disrespectful to real military personnel who actually HAVE lost fellow soldiers in battle. When the story opens Tom is allowing himself to be his 6-year-old niece's show-and-tell for her class. He walks into the classroom and is basically bowled over by how gorgeous the teacher, Caitlin Rose is. Caitlin's behavior in this scene felt kind of off to me. She seemed to go out of her way to touch Tom an awful lot which felt contradictory to her inner monologue claims of being terrified of ultra-muscular military men. One thing leads to another and soon Tom and his niece are over at Caitlin's house having dinner. The munchkin helpfully falls asleep so the grown ups can talk and Caitlin presses Tom to tell her about his time in the Navy. Tom opens up about his last mission and Caitlin tries to tell him that she knows exactly what he's going through. Tom gets pissed and tells her she doesn't and could never understand and then leaves. This is the central conflict of the story, Caitlin insisting that she knows just how he feels and Tom insisting that she doesn't. I kind of felt like both of them had a point but instead of this making me like and understand them both, it actually made me dislike them both for being such pompous jerks. First, Tom was way over-the-top with his "no one can understand my pain" routine, considering that his fellow soldier had actually DIED on that mission and he himself still had all his limbs and so forth. He of all people should have recognized how much worse his situation could have been and how many other soldiers come home with far more debilitating injuries. There are, in point of fact, thousands of people who can "understand his pain." So it made him seem kind of whiny and full of himself that he insisted that he alone had gotten such a raw deal in life. However, on the flip side, I thought Caitlin was equally full of herself for insisting that she knew exactly what Tom was going through. No, she doesn't. Being a soldier in combat is NOT the same as being in a car accident. I understand the parallel that the author was trying to draw between Caitlin's dancing career and Tom's driving need to be a SEAL but it's just not the same. Particularly the part about him losing a fellow soldier in the explosion. Caitlin's "do you think you're the only one who's ever lost anyone?" shot was out of line, particularly when the only person she'd ever lost was her mother to natural causes. And again, it felt disrespectful that the author kept downplaying the military life and the risks real soldiers take when they go on missions. MAYBE it would have worked if Caitlin's backstory had been a bit different. If she'd lost her ability to dance, not to a car accident, but to one of her abusive father's beatings and her mother had been killed in the same incident. Surviving a life of abuse and losing your fellow abuse victim, whom you feel you failed to protect, would be more similar to the life-and-death situations faced and the bonds formed by soldiers in combat. But that's not Caitlin's backstory so her insistence that she'd experienced the exact same pain as Tom was pompous crap. Caitlin's very pissed at Tom for shouting at her and refusing to listen to her explanation of how she knows just how he feels. She was also terrified by his sudden display of anger because it reminds her of the way her abusive father and ex-boyfriend would erupt into uncontrollable rages just before lashing out to hit her. So she adopts a "good riddance" attitude about it and vows to never see him again. There's a really bizarre couple of scenes in this part of the book that made it feel like some of the pages got switched around because the timeline didn't work. Caitlin is talking to some friend about how Tom's such a jerk and the friend says what Caitlin needs is a night out on the town. She agrees and then heads off to teach her ballet class, thinking about how she hopes Tom just drops his niece at the door rather than coming inside so she won't have to see him. Then in the very next scene Tom is at home with the niece and the ballet class is never mentioned. Did she skip ballet that day? It was weird that the author called attention to the class and then didn't pay it off. Next thing we know it's the following day and Caitlin is back in her classroom teaching the kids. What about her planned trip to the bar with the friend? Then a whole bunch of stuff happens that leads you to think the next scene will be Tom and Caitlin hiking together and instead suddenly we're with Tom at a bar and he see's Caitlin there. The timeline was just all messed up and poorly explained. Getting back to the romance, Tom, still feels like he's 100% right that Caitlin could never understand his pain but is so attracted to her gorgeous self that he decides to apologize and try to make amends. So he sends an apology note to school with his niece, who passes it to Caitlin. I think this was supposed to be cute but I thought it was a cop-out that he apologized via a note and a third party instead of in person. Caitlin, however, goes from "I'll never speak to him again" to "all is forgiven" in the space of about 15 seconds and agrees to join him for a hike the following day. This didn't make sense to me. She basically talked herself into forgiving him with the very weak justification that she always tells her 6-year-old students to give people second chances so she'd be hypocritical if she refused to give Tom one, but it just doesn't jive with her backstory. If she'd really been afraid of him and his propensity to explode in anger, why on Earth would she agree to go to a secluded place in the wilderness with him? Why would she ever agree to see him again, period? She of all people should be suspicious of men who lash out in anger but then apologize after the fact. That's the classic cycle for abusers and as a survivor of just such abuse, she should have looked at this behavior and at least considered the possibility that the cycle was starting all over again, but she doesn't. Then, as already mentioned, the scene shifts and we're at the bar and Caitlin is completely trashed. Again, this whole scene made no sense and really bothered me. For starters, nothing about Caitlin's personality that we've seen so far suggests that she'd EVER get so drunk at a public bar that she'd lose complete control of herself. She's been shown to be a sweet, sensitive, level-headed person who fears attacks by men above all else. Her character would never get so drunk that she'd be ripe for some strange man to assault her. For another thing, the whole reason she and the friend were going to the bar was so Caitlin could drown her sorrows over Tom. But she's already forgiven Tom and agreed to go on the hike with him the following day. So why the heck does she need to get trashed now if everything is fine? Third, when Tom sees her making a fool of herself in public and attracting the attention of every lecherous man in the bar, he goes all caveman and stalks over to grab her by the arm. He grabs her "harder than he'd meant to" to the point where, even as drunk as she is, she cries out in pain. Here again we have Tom behaving in a way that makes it seem like he really might be an abuser. He's so jealous that other men are looking at "his woman" and so angry with her for "putting on such a show" that he physically hurts her. Again, classic abusive boyfriend behavior here. And yet, the book keeps bashing us over the head with the notion that he just wants to "protect" her and he'd never, ever hurt her....even after he's just done so. And finally, it really, really bugged me that Caitlin's friend let her get taken home by this guy. She's supposed to be looking out for her drunk friend. Protecting her from being abused by some man in her inebriated state. She also knows all about how badly Tom behaved the last time he and Caitlin were together, and just witnessed him physically hurting her. And she lets him take Caitlin home by himself just because he's cute and she'd rather to flirt with his military buddies? Are you kidding me?! And the next morning she calls Caitlin and wants to know all the juicy details about whether she and Tom had sex the night before. WHAT?!?! She knows Caitlin was too drunk to give consent and yet she's hoping Tom took advantage of the situation to bang her anyway??? This woman is a monster! The next morning Caitlin is hung over but feels she "owes" it to Tom to still go hiking because he so nicely brought her home the night before and did not take the opportunity to molest her. She's barely functioning when Tom shows up and he can't resist rubbing her nose in the fact that he's fit as a fiddle and has already had a 2-hour run and done other assorted tasks. His behavior in this whole scene was kind of jerky and leaned heavily toward "paternal" rather than romantic. He lectured her on her behavior and the proper way to get rid of a hangover, even refusing to hand over her breakfast until she'd drunk the vegetable drink he'd brought for her. It didn't do anything to make me view them as a couple. They finally go on their hike and barely a mile in Caitlin manages to sprain her ankle so Tom has to carry her back to the car. On the way they sing a military marching song (or "cadence" as the author rather heavy-handedly points out is the correct term). This went on way longer than was necessary, especially considering it was the second time in the book we'd had to listen to such a cadence. This seemed like a case of the author yelling "I DID THE RESEARCH" by proving that she knew some of these marching tunes. Tom takes Caitlin to his family's house for dinner, then they head back to her place and finally have sex which, as I've already said, was thankfully not described. The next morning, everything is great until they get in the car for a picnic at the beach. Just before they arrive, Caitlin starts in again on Tom's injury and it sparks another fight. He again becomes so enraged that he shouts at her grabs her by the arm without even realizing he's doing it. She panics and starts clawing as his hand and demanding to be let go. Once her screams manage to break through his rage, he releases her and again insists that he'd never, ever hurt her or any woman. Again, this just seems like classic abuser behavior. This is now the third time in just a few days that he's lost control of himself and lashed out at her in anger. Then he insists he'd never hurt her, just like an abuser would. Yet Caitlin doesn't recognize this as a pattern and instead focuses on the fact that he still won't listen to her insistence that she knows just how he feels. So she tells him her tale of woe and, because this is a fiction book, Tom has a great epiphany about how totally right she's been that she understands. That he's been a fool for not seeing how great he's got it, what with his loving family to support him and all. It didn't feel like a real reaction because her story only proves that she DOESN'T know how he feels. Not really, and that's exactly what he'd say to her in reality. Be here in fiction world he's overcome with how wrong he's been and apologizes to her but she says that they're through and can never be together. Then she literally walks away, even though she's miles from home and Tom drove. I didn't really understand why Caitlin broke off the relationship at this point. Or why in the ensuing week she kept insisting in her inner monologue that they could never be together. She'd finally told him her story and he'd apologized and said she'd been right all along so...what's the problem here? She kept going on about how she'd finally opened up and let a man into her world but he'd betrayed that trust but, how exactly did he do that? By just not listening to her? He finally did listen and admitted he'd been wrong so what more is she waiting for? It felt like she was just punishing him for no reason other than for its own sake. Or rather, because the book needed a climax and this was the best the author could come up with. Tom spends a few days wallowing in how badly he'd "stuffed up" the situation, which really yanked me out of the narrative. When I hear the term "stuffed up" I think of a blocked nose. I realize this is a cozy and the author wanted to avoid curse words but she could have said "messed up" or "screwed up" or something like that. The fact that she had multiple people in the book say this in just a couple of pages was really distracting. But anyway, he learns that Caitlin has a ballet class that day and rushes over to ask her to hear him out....without having even a shadow of a plan in mind for what he'll say to her. Is this the kind of planning that he used as a SEAL? Caitlin immediately agrees to hear him out after her class, which didn't jive with her "we can never be together" chant from the preceding week. She again justifies this with talk about how she tells her kids to give people second chances, apparently forgetting that she's ALREADY given Tom his second chance and he blew it, at least, according to her. I just didn't understand her thought process at all. This feeling was reinforced when hear Tom's "apology." It was lame and didn't really do anything to change their situation. First he told her about how his parents had divorced when his dad cheated on his mom, which didn't have anything to do with anything in the book. It didn't make him want to become a SEAL or in any way influence Tom's behavior up to this point so it was totally gratuitous. Then he takes Caitlin to the Naval base so she can watch some recruits training. By the time she's done watching a "how long can you hold your breath" challenge, she's totally forgiven Tom. I'm sorry, what did that exercise have to do with his behavior?? Nothing. I didn't understand why she was still mad at him to begin with, but since she kept insisting that she was, how does this little show-and-tell session impact anything? She already understood how important being a SEAL was to him, at least, she kept insisting that she did, so how does seeing it in person change anything? I didn't get it. Pretty much the only thing I DID understand and agree with was Caitlin's refusal of Tom's proposal. After the trip to the Naval base, he gets down on on knee and proposes. After they've only known each other for a week and a half, most of which they spent apart and/or mad at each other. Yeah, it was way too soon to pop the question. (hide spoiler)] So in summary, I didn't understand the characters' behavior or motivations, there was zero sexual tension between the hero and heroine, and they both acted like self-important jerks with regards to the hero's trauma. I think it's fair to say nothing about this story worked for me. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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not set
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Jun 26, 2016
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Mass Market Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0345541855
| 9780345541857
| 0345541855
| 4.11
| 6,881
| Jun 23, 2015
| Jun 23, 2015
|
liked it
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I started out really loving this book, and that continued right up to about the halfway point. After that, things took an odd turn and got kind of bog
I started out really loving this book, and that continued right up to about the halfway point. After that, things took an odd turn and got kind of bogged down in inexplicable arguments and miscellaneous family members. (view spoiler)[ Okay so the story is that Hallie has an evil stepsister named Shelly. Shelly is tall and beautiful and she and her mother, Ruby, made Hallie's childhood a living hell. Shelly was put first in everything and Hallie was neglected and tormented. They drove Hallie's beloved grandparents away, bulldozed the lush garden Hallie loved so much, and even spent Hallie's college fund on Shelly's acting lessons and head shots. And that was in addition to Shelly repeatedly destroying Hallie's bike, computer, clothes, etc. and when they got older, stealing Hallie's boyfriends. Hallie's father was a total coward and dealt with all this by running away. Throughout her whole life, the only people Hallie could count on were her kindly neighbor and the neighbor's son, Braden. Even though Braden was several years older than Hallie, he always took the time to talk to her, cheer her up, and think of solutions to the latest problem. Consequently, Hallie developed a huge crush on him that she carried into adulthood. When the story opens, Hallie is running around completing errands for Shelly and has to return home unexpectedly because an envelope of important papers has disappeared from her bag. When she arrives, she finds Shelly entertaining a man, only the man is calling Shelly Hallie. It soon comes out that Hallie had inherited a house in Nantucket from a very distant relation she never knew about and Shelly was trying to steal it by pretending she was Hallie. She'd even forged a passport and Hallie's signature to perpetuate the ruse. Once the truth comes out, the man, Jared, is pissed at what almost happened and volunteers to pay all legal costs if Hallie wants to file charges against Shelly. He also informs Hallie that Shelly was supposed to leave with him that very day to go see the house and also to act as a private physical therapist for his cousin, Jamie, who had injured his knee in a skiing accident. Hallie decides spur-of-the-moment to go to Nantucket and take on the job. When she arrives, she snoops in Jamie's date book before meeting him and finds several glossy photos of the beautiful Shelly and decides he's like all the other men who fall all over Shelly. Then she meets Jamie and he's stunned by Hallie's beauty and makes kind of a fool of himself stammering through his shock. Hallie is also wildly attracted to him but yells at him and says their interactions are to be strictly professional then stalks off. Jamie follows her and apologizes but seems surprisingly reluctant to actually let her do her job of rehabilitating his knee. For the rest of the first half of the book we see Jamie and Hallie interacting together as they get to know one another. Jamie refuses to take any of his clothes off in front of her, which means she can't give him the full-body massages he desperately needs. He also has nightmares every night at 2 am and Hallie begins a habit of going into his room each night to soothe him back to sleep. I agree with what some of the other reviewers have said about this part of the book in that is got kind of squicky. Hallie knows that Jamie is taking powerful sedatives and is completely unaware of what is going on when she's in his room at night. But she proceeds to kiss him and at one point almost has sex with him while he's in this state. Despite what Jude Deveraux's facebook page claims, this was not Hallie merely THINKING about having sex with the gorgeous Jamie. They were actually in the act of doing it. The only thing that prevented them from going all the way was the fact that Hallie still had her underwear on when the drugged up Jamie tried to enter her, so the barrier slowed things down. Then Jamie said another woman's name and only THEN did Hallie decide to call a halt to things. If it hadn't been for those two things, she'd have been having sex with a man who didn't even know she was there and wouldn't remember it in the morning. That is not okay. If their situations had been reversed and Hallie had been the one drugged to the point where she couldn't give consent, everyone would be screaming rape. It's not different just because it was the guy who was drugged. Aside from that, though, Hallie and Jamie's relationship progresses fairly well in the first half of the book. They laugh and talk and think about each other when they're apart. There are also some matchmaking ghosts in the house who clearly want to get the two of them together. Then Jamie's extremely extensive family invades and things kind of go off the rails. We're introduced to a frankly staggering number of gorgeous men who are all related to Jamie in some way and they proceed to monopolize Hallie's time for several days. They all seem to like Hallie and talk about how Jamie is so much better thanks to her ministrations but they flatly refuse to tell her anything about the source of his odd behavior. Jamie, meanwhile, disappears with no explanation. His twin brother, Todd, is also there and behaves very hostilely toward Hallie right from the word go. It isn't long before Hallie stumbles across Jamie's big secret. She sees him stepping out of the shower after working out with Todd and finally sees that his body is completely covered with horrible scars. Todd tries to hustle her away, apparently sure that she'll be disgusted by the sight, and Jamie just freezes. Hallie walks up and inspects the damage and rightfully guesses that Jamie was a soldier. Then she tells him to get off her property, along with all his family. I didn't really like Hallie's reaction in this scene. I expected her to be mad or something, but all she kept saying was that Jamie had insulted her profession by keeping this from her. Out of all the things she could have thrown at him in that moment, her job just didn't seem that important. How about demanding to know how he could think she'd be so shallow as to care about something like that? Or if her job had to be brought into it, how about asking him if he thought he was the first person she'd ever encountered who had terrible scars, considering she was in the healthcare profession and specifically cared for people who'd experienced debilitating injuries? It was just weird. But after this initial blowup, they proceed immediately to having hot, steamy sex. I kind of felt like the book could have ended right there. The big secret that had been hanging over their relationship had been exposed, they'd discovered that they still had feelings for each other and then had the mind-blowing sex to seal the deal. That pretty much wraps things up, right? But that's only the halfway point in the book and things just kind of staggered around after that. Even though they've slept together, Hallie pushes Jamie away and tries to convince herself that Braden is her one true love. And Jamie lets her push him away. But then Hallie kind of wavers back and forth about things because she's still so attracted to Jamie and his family is so nice, except for Todd, who still hates her. She goes shopping with Jamie's mother and it's clear to the mother that Hallie is in love with her son. But when Hallie gets back to the house that night, the ghosts contrive to lock her in a room so that she's forced to listen to Todd and Jamie having a talk in which Todd basically says that Hallie is no good. That she's more in love with Jamie's extended family and their wealth than Jamie himself. Instead of ripping Todd a new one for all his false notions, Hallie instead decides that he's right about everything and proceeds to distance herself from Jamie and his family, and refocus her attentions on Braden. The whole thing was just weird. Then Braden shows up and makes a drunken proposal to her. She pseudo-accepts and he puts the ring on her finger. The ghosts make it stick on her finger so it won't come off, strengthening everyone's belief that Braden is her true love and the one she should choose. Jamie is jealous but also thinks the reason Hallie has been so distant is because he's only "half a man" and she doesn't want to have to deal with that for the rest of her life. Then there's an unexpected twist with Braden, which I won't spoil, and ultimately Hallie decides she wants to be with Jamie after all. (hide spoiler)] All in all, it just felt like the second half of the book could have been cut out completely. I didn't believe any of the made up reasons Hallie gave in her head for not being with Jamie. Not after he'd been essentially panting after her the whole book and making his interest very clear, AND they'd had the mind-blowing sex. Also, I was irritated that there was no resolution between Todd and Hallie. He never apologized or gave any indication that he realized he'd been wrong about her. I did like hearing Shelly's side of their childhood. I hadn't expected to feel the least bit sympathetic toward her but JD did a good job of explaining things from Shelly's perspective and it made sense. The twist with Braden was unexpected which is a good thing since romance novels rarely involve twists that you can't see coming a mile away, but it did strain believably just a wee bit. And I thought JD did a great job of portraying Jamie's battle with PTSD. How it affected him on multiple levels because he hated the way his family had to tiptoe around him all the time for fear of setting off one of his episodes. The ghost aspect of the story I could take or leave. I like paranormal romances and was interested in the fact that there were matchmaking ghosts in this book, but the ghosts' actions didn't make a whole lot of sense. Why would they force Hallie to think Braden was her true love if they ultimately wanted her to end up with Jamie? It seemed like they set up more roadblocks to the romance than they did to facilitate it. On the whole, it all balances out to a decent book. I finished it with no problem but I don't think I'll read it again. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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not set
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Mar 31, 2016
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Hardcover
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my rating |
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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| 4.30
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did not like it
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Dec 29, 2021
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Dec 29, 2021
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| 3.90
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it was ok
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Nov 28, 2021
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Nov 28, 2021
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| 4.10
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it was ok
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Jan 09, 2020
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Jan 10, 2020
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|||||
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| 3.90
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did not like it
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Mar 06, 2019
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Mar 07, 2019
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|||||
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| 3.97
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it was ok
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Sep 02, 2018
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Sep 02, 2018
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|||||
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| 3.85
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it was ok
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Jul 17, 2018
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Jul 18, 2018
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|||||
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| 3.14
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it was ok
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Jun 27, 2018
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Jul 04, 2018
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| 3.56
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it was ok
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May 18, 2018
not set
not set
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Jun 01, 2018
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| 3.39
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did not like it
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Apr 12, 2018
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Apr 12, 2018
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|||||
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| 3.99
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it was ok
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Nov 28, 2017
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Nov 29, 2017
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|||||
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| 3.79
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it was ok
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Oct 27, 2017
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Oct 27, 2017
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| 3.82
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did not like it
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Sep 29, 2017
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Sep 29, 2017
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|||||
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| 3.82
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really liked it
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Jul 20, 2017
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Jul 20, 2017
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| 3.82
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liked it
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Feb 05, 2017
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Feb 06, 2017
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| 3.69
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it was ok
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Feb 2017
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Feb 06, 2017
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| 3.99
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did not like it
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not set
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Nov 16, 2016
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|||||
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| 3.74
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liked it
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not set
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Jun 26, 2016
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|||||
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| 3.78
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liked it
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not set
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Jun 26, 2016
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|||||
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| 3.68
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did not like it
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not set
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Jun 26, 2016
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| 4.11
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liked it
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not set
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Mar 31, 2016
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