Rating: WORTHY!
This is a very short (68 widely spaced pps) which the blurb describes somewhat illiterately as a 25,000 word novella that can be "enjoyed on it's [sic] own"! I found it sad that even this story is largely based, like so many stupid YA novels that have any kind of romance in them, on pure looks. As the blurb puts it: She’s instantly drawn to the gorgeous customer," and how 'gorgeous' or 'beautiful' or 'hot' this girl is comes up often.
The blurb asks, "Could someone so caring, passionate and beautiful really ever want Kalli?" and that at least brings 'caring' into the question, but nothing about decency, smarts, companionability, integrity, reliability, loyalty, or whatever. It made it feel a bit shallow. The feeling I got was that the author had rendered Dana as a social worker as a kind of shorthand for character building, under the assumption that we’d all love her as a decent human being without the author having to do any of the work to get us there.
The two main characters behave more like they're thirteen rather than twenty-three (I assume their age is somewhere around mid-twenties although it’s not specified. I do get that people falling in love can become rather giddy, but a little more self-control would have made for a more realistic story with a greater hope of a relationship that had some legs. Fortunately this wasn't done to a nauseating degree, so I appreciated that.
One thing which struck me though, especially given how much physical lust was broadcast in this story (which was all from Kalli's PoV although fortunately for me, not first person), was the lack of any focus on any particular physical aspect of the other woman. Yeah, Kalli does become focused on Dana's green eyes, but despite a lot of lustful thoughts on behalf of both parties, neither one of them ever seems to attach herself to any specific body part - like lips, hair, breasts, legs, ass, fingers, or something like that. That felt a bit unlikely to me.
There were some gaffs in the text, too: I read at the start of chapter five that “She’d been out that morning to get a new phone, and called Dana immediately" and just a paragraph later, Kalli "...tingled at the thought that Dana called just to talk about nothing”, yet as we read, it was Kalli who called Dana, not the other way around! later I read, “A thin slither of skin was visible.” I think she means that a sliver of skin was visible!
All of that said, I do consider this a worthy read, but not a great read!
