Mountains Trilogy by Phoebe Alexander

Rating: WARTY!

"They're as different as two people can be," Are they really?! "but the chemistry between college professor Sarah Lynde and Army officer James McAllister is too hot to handle" and nevertheless it gets safely slapped between the staid gray covers of a book. Yawn.

The Playground by Phoebe Alexander

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.

This one has a swinging schoolteacher. I quit reading when the writer wrote 'forte' with an accent on the 'e'. That's not a word. The word isn't from Italian, where the 'e' is sounded, but from the French where it's not, although both words mean 'strong'. It's pronounced 'fort' not 'fortay'. A writer should know this.

Though the 'e' is sounded in Italian, there's no accent on it. So even if the author was trying to claim it's from the Italian, what she actually wrote is a nonsense word. That and this business with the primary school-teacher swinger was just too much for me. The writing was boiler-plate boring anyway, so I saw no reason to continue. It's not that a teacher's private life - as long as it's kept separate from school (and isn't illegal!) - is anything to do with her professional life, but this felt like the author was just trying to damned hard. I can;t commend this one.