Rating: WARTY!
I got this freebie which offers sample chapters of a bunch of "romance" novels - that sort of thing I never read, so I decided to take a look at this limited sample - each book had only an opening chapter or two - and to see if they were truly as bad as I think they are. It turns out - they are! Who knew? I decided to review these based solely on the sample chapters, which believe me is more than enough to judge this trash. None of these books would remotely pass the Bechdel-Wallace test because they can't even pass it within one female character's own head! It's all about guys and sex all the time and some might argue that this is okay because that's the whole purpose of the book, but I'd argue that people who say that sort of thing are missing the point - and by some serious margin, too. Actually it's not even a margin, it's more like a burgeon.
I'm sure they thought it would be cute, each writing their own alternating chapters in a dual first person voice story. The female is named Laura Peters and a peter is all she can think of. The leading male can't stand her and she sure as hell hates him, we're told. Yet they somehow overcome this hatred in their need to over...come. Laura is a trauma doctor and she's just had a very young child die after a fall which caused internal bleeding in the head. The kid is basically written-off and consigned to organ donation without even any attempt to save him.
Naturally an ER doctor never gets laid because they're always working in the ER with no time off! No, she's not an intern doing a rotation, she's a regular doctor, and still she has no free time. Even after a child dies right in front of her, or rather is given up on, the first thing the Peters thinks about is sex with the medic who brought the kid in - the one she hates but wants inexplicably wants to jump his bones. She doesn't think if there's anything she could have done differently, or what else might be done or might have been done to save the child. And this is despite chewing out one of her underlings earlier, specifically for not thinking everything through! She's a do as I say not as I do sort of a hypocrite.
As soon as chapter 2 came up and it was obvious it was going to be alternating dual first person, I wanted to quit, but I read a couple of paras just to see how this perspective went. It was no better. The transition from one paragraph where he's thinking about her to a second paragraph begins like this: "My thoughts returned again to Doctor Laura Peters." The thing is that they had never been anywhere else! This dude has an unhealthy and potentially dangerous obsession with her. Maybe they really are meant for each other. But not for me. This is trash and I quit right there.
Dual first person is twice as bad as single first person which is worst person, and this story was just stupid, unoriginal and unrealistic. There are no shades of gray here - not that that novel would have been any better. I can't commend garbage like this. I'm definitely done with Ellie Masters.
