Author: Theresa Myers (no website found)
Publisher: Entangled
Rating: WARTY!
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Entangled Publishing. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. I really appreciate the opportunity to review this novel, so thank you, Entangled!
I am sorry to have to report that it took only a dozen pages until I was regretting reading this novel. Before I began reading, I thought it was going to be a romantic comedy with the added joy (for me!) of some high-tech surroundings. When I started reading, I thought it was going to be a dark revenge story. By page twelve, it looked like it was just another tired and clichéd young-adult romance flimsily disguised as something more mature.
This is part of a 'Sexy in Seattle' series (try saying that fast, three or four times!). This particular volume is about the relationship which Caroline Parker, a self-employed image consultant, has with high-tech whiz-kid Joshua Martin, but it's not that simple. These two have a history and it's not a pleasant one.
When an anonymous caller insists that Caroline take on the job of image consultant to Joshua as he launches an important new business venture, she refuses because she detests Joshua so much. It takes a threat that her brother, Connor, will end up in jail if she does not comply, to make Caroline feel that she has no choice. Plus, revenge promises to be sweet.
We're told that when these three kids were in high school, Joshua wrote something in a letter to her strict military father which caused him to ship her off to a nasty European academy for two years. She didn't have the maturity to confront Joshua over this to get to the truth, and it seems that she still hasn't achieved that level of maturity even now. Her brother was purportedly robbed of a share in the profits from the business he helped Joshua to launch, and which made Joshua the billionaire he is today.
My immediate suspicion fell upon Connor as the one orchestrating all of this, but far from being intrigued and imbued with a desire to find out what really happened, and if my first guess was right or wrong, I was quickly turned off the story by the hilarious "bitch-in-heat" behavior of Caroline. Her conduct was not only laughably absurd, it was entirely unrealistic given what we'd learned about her up to that point, so her character was, quite simply, betrayed for me.
Recall that this is a woman who has been festering a massive grudge against Joshua for well over a decade (and for very good reasons from her PoV), yet as soon as she enters his company, she's like a thirteen-year-old with neither mores nor self-control. She's all but panting and raising her rear end, inviting him to rut. It's pathetic to see a woman demean and sell herself like this even when it's only a fictional one. It's even more pathetic when this is a main character who, we've been told, hates this guy and is coldly calculating her revenge on him.
Note that I read this in Adobe Reader, where it looked fine. The reason I did that was because when I tried reading it in a Kindle, the formatting was not anywhere near up to par. There were no chapters listed, so it was impossible to jump to them. Hopefully that issue will be taken care of before the actual ebook is released.
That issue was manageable, but I had multiple problems with this novel that had nothing to do with technicalities. For example, I found it unbelievable that Caroline was either too clueless or too irresponsible to go to the police when she was blackmailed. Given how implausible and unrealistic her actions were throughout this novel (at least the portion that I read), I guess dumb behavior was, in the end, entirely in character for her.
Yes, you can have your character not go to the police if you choose, but for goodness sakes if you do that, then at least give us a plausible reason why she felt she had no choice in the matter. Don't just have her do it out of the blue, because that just leaves us to conclude that she's nothing but a weak female pawn. I cannot respect a character like that.
So what would I have done? Since my blog is about writing as well as reading, it's not an unrealistic question to ask. What I would have done was brought in the police to maintain realism. I would have had a detective in whom Caroline could develop an interest whilst remaining cold towards Joshua. She could then, on behalf of the police, continue with make-over assignment for the very purpose of flushing out the blackmailer.
In that way I would have had a choice: continue with the detective, or follow this novel's intended plot by having Joshua not be a jerk. Instead he would have been a much deeper and less juvenile guy with maybe a shy, but winning personality, and a deep-enough back-story that would not only win readers, but also, and no matter how painstakingly, win Caroline's heart. In order to do that, of course, Caroline would have had to have a lot more to offer than good looks and bad self-control. She would have had to have been a lot stronger, deeper character which had something to appeal to a Joshua, who in this version was significantly more than the testosterone-personified character that we got here.
So instead of the interesting story I was expecting, all I got was a 'romance' in which actual love plays no part. This is a story about unadulterated lust, and all that's missing is a picture of a naked male torso on the cover. Oh wait, I see the Barnes & Noble version does! That wasn't on my ARC copy! LOL! Now if you like that sort of thing, then this is the novel for you. For me, all it did was to cheapen it immeasurably because there was no respect here, no friendship, no mingling of interests, no maturity, no intelligence, no humor, and nothing attractive about the relationship at all.
The biggest sour note, apart from this farcical 'romance' was how disappointingly shallow the two characters were. This is separate from - and in addition to - their being simply shallow as people within the context of the novel. The characters felt like paper dolls to me - people who you cannot imagine living any life outside the thin confines of the novel's covers. It's impossible for me to become invested in characters like that.
These 'people' had no back-story (other than the brief summary we were fed), no feeling, no depth, and nothing to offer a reader in pursuit of something with a decent amount of depth. I was given no reason to be interested in, much less to root for, either of them. We're told, for example, that Joshua is a workaholic, yet he finds all the time in the world for Caroline with nary a disruption caused by the demands of his massive conglomerate. She, in turn, had no calls on her time other than Joshua. What - he was her only business interest? How did she ever make a living with no roster of clients?
Joshua is clearly modeled on Steve Jobs, and the writing makes it clear that he's just as big of a jerk as Jobs was noted for being by his biographer. Joshua has no more respect for Caroline than she does for him. The story makes it quite clear from their first encounter that she's nothing more than a piece of meat. How can any self-respecting person even begin to like a character like that or to like the woman who allows herself to become that for him?
As soon as they meet, he vows to himself that he will have her in his bed. He's nothing but a dick with no real balls, and his adolescent behavior towards Caroline is completely inappropriate and not even uninteresting. Is this what we're calling a romance these days, the blue-eyed Aryan master ravaging the limp, fully-compliant maiden-slave? The fact that she offers no hint of a negative reaction to his behavior speaks volumes about her, too.
These characters evidently never actually left high school. They're in such a state of arrested adolescence that they play truth or dare. I am not kidding. I made it just beyond page fifty - about 25% the way through - before my growing nausea was pushed beyond acceptability by this painfully stupid revelation, and at that point I was forced to abandon it.
This novel was presented as some sort of high-tech story, which was what attracted me to it, but there never was any actual high tech, not in the part I read. Clearly that was no more than a thin veneer applied to disguise a trope 'love' story which in the end wasn't even a love story, and which wasn't in the least engrossing - not unless you want to entertain yourself by counting how many clichés appear. Personally, I lost count.
I'm sorry. I know all-too-well that novels take a lot of dedication and work, and any author has a lot invested in the result, but I cannot in good conscience recommend a novel which doesn't even try to offer me something by which to recommend it.
