by Ken Rander
Rating: 2 of 5 starsMy Review:
I barely want to admit that I read this and that I am willing to give it two stars instead of just one. Because for as much as the writing was so strange, I didn't really think about relegating this book to the Did-Not-Finish pile.
It is really hard to rate though. It wasn't what I expected and that doesn't inherently make it bad, but I'm just not sure what to say about it. First of all, it's listed on Amazon as a New Adult/College Romance. As I was clicking around through my normal romance-ish recommendations on Amazon, this one came up. Since it was free and the description sounded interesting, I decided to give it a try. You can see from the cover it's going to be a bit racier than plain romance, but at the end of the book the acknowledgements basically say this was written as a “smut” book with a little bit of storyline. Most romance authors that I read don't talk like that about any romance books and most authors I read don't write like this. Romance is it's own genre and is not “smut”. I didn't find this book to be that much more sexual that most of the other romance novels I read, it was just strangely different.
I kept reading this book wondering who writes like this. The writing itself seemed rather juvenile – like an early college, male wrote it. It felt very mechanical. Instead of all the pieces flowing together, it felt like there was a checklist to make sure each of these elements got added to the story. “Little bit of get to know you? Check. Meet before sex? Check. Protection talk? Check.”
The writing felt very crude and base, like a Hangover-style movie. I can't tell you how many times the characters run into a room saying “I have to pee”. Yes, real life happens this way sometimes, but for a book that's mostly about sex, that sort of stuff just isn't sexy.
At one point, the female character is somewhat turned on that the male piled towels next to the bed and laid some out on the bed because now she knows they're going to make a wet mess. I started wondering if this was meant to be a farce and it just wasn't funny or if we were supposed to take this seriously.
Lots of words and phrases were overused and used in unusual ways. Just a lot of unsexy, sex talk. It's possible that it's just not my style so I found it odd. Maybe one day language will shift and these phrases will take on new sexy meanings. But until then, this is a story that just didn't work for me. And if you're looking for something that's actually romance or even erotica, there are plenty of other books. This book isn't one of them.
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