RATING: ✖✖
A romance novel starting with a failed proposal in the middle of a stadium, promising drama and spicy romance? Yay! A romance novel with a good, dramatic setup that flops, with a forced sense of diversity and a bland romance? Nay …
SYNOPSIS:When freelance writer Nikole Paterson goes to a Dodgers game with her actor boyfriend, his man bun, and his bros, the last thing she expects is a scoreboard proposal. Saying no isn’t the hard part–they’ve only been dating for five months, and he can’t even spell her name correctly. The hard part is having to face a stadium full of disappointed fans…
At the game with his sister, Carlos Ibarra comes to Nik’s rescue and rushes her away from a camera crew. He’s even there for her when the video goes viral and Nik’s social media blows up–in a bad way. Nik knows that in the wilds of LA, a handsome doctor like Carlos can’t be looking for anything serious, so she embarks on an epic rebound with him, filled with food, fun, and fantastic sex. But when their glorified hookups start breaking the rules, one of them has to be smart enough to put on the brakes…
I did not like this book. I’m starting to sound like a lonely, desperate spinster when it comes to how many of these romance books that I’ve been roasting, but I’m sorry — I just can’t bring myself to like some of them, least of all this one. I was just so … disappointed? by it. I’ve been hearing all of these reviews praising Jasmine Guillory’s romance novels, so I figured it wouldn’t hurt to pick one up and actually try it. My mistake.
I fell for the juicy premise and the cute cover, but I discovered that this was not my style. I can see how some people really enjoy this style of writing, but I can’t bring myself to like it no matter how much I try. Generally, I enjoy romance novels with an overall fluffy, feel-good sense of emotion to them — this one, to me, felt messy. I couldn’t get on board with the structure or the characters, and Guillory’s style of writing was, to me, not ideal. She’s not a bad writer, don’t get me wrong — I just didn’t really like the way she formulated her descriptions, speaker tags, general story setup. It’s hard to describe because this is such an individual thing between readers, but for people who don’t intend to review this book, it’s probably relatively unnoticeable.
ANYWAY, back to the actual novel. The forced diversity thing I mentioned in the beginning — it was just weird. I’m all for literary diversity in books, as I think everyone should feel that they can find some parts of themselves represented in books, but it should happen in an organic, natural way. In this book it was just very blunt, and generic. This book essentially boiled down the main characters’ personalities into three parts:
Nik: black female writer & Carlos: latino doctor tacos
I can’t remember anything more than that. Their personalities just didn’t feel fleshed out, and I disliked the cardboard-cutout feeling they gave me. This, in turn, turned me away from the romance itself. I just didn’t root for them. I stopped liking them as characters, so I stopped liking their romance, and so I stopped liking the novel itself. Sorry.
The final issue of the book was, to me, the sense that it was heading in no direction. It starts off with a bang, this big, failed Jumbotron proposal, and then it just … fizzles out. There’s nothing else dramatic happening, nothing big or exciting that forces the romance and makes it feel exciting and spicy. It feels more like watching a sped-up Sims 3 gameplay — they just go about their daily lives and then they occasionally have a date and then they stand and stare into a wall and then they sleep and do it all over again. I mean, sure, things were happening in their lives — but they were just normal stuff. A good romance, should — in my opinion — show 1) that both of the characters are growing and experiencing things independently and 2) that these individual growths enable them to become a better couple. Otherwise, the relationship becomes either bland or weirdly co-dependent — which I dislike, at least. In this book, it was just bland. I didn’t feel like I would start bawling and being sad if they didn’t end up together, and I didn’t feel like I’d be any happier when they did end up together.
Not my cup of tea.
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