Kimani, $7.99, ISBN 978-1-335-45840-7
Contemporary Romance, 2019
Elle Wright’s All for You is an oddity in that, from a technical point of view, well, it’s readable.
That’s the best thing I can say about it. The narrative style won’t cause too many untoward side effects.
However, there’s nothing much else to say about it.
The story is much ado about nothing.
Myles Jackson is a surgeon—I’m told that he’s an awesome one, naturally, although he doesn’t do much surgeon-y stuff there—but he is all about playing music, and he’s only a surgeon because he thinks that that’s what his father expects him to be.
He meets free-spirited artist and gallery manager Aria Bell, and deep inside her, er, embrace, and with plenty of patronizing advice from various secondary characters that serve as the author’s blatant mouthpieces to nag the hero into doing whatever that is best for the plot, he decides to switch vocation.
His family is filthy loaded, so his decision will not cause untoward issues like the pressing need to get a new job ASAP to pay the bills and the rent, et cetera, so at the end of the day, we all learn that romance is something that only obscenely wealthy people can fully indulge in with abandon and joy.
In other words, this is a first world problem romance, made into an all about nothing particular drama because Myles’s father, as male characters tend to be in the Kimani line, is not insane or unreasonable. The whole thing is what it is because of a lack of communication.
The romance is a typical one in this line, as it’s about a hot woman being pursued by a hot wealthy bloke that still has all his hair as well as abs of steel.
Ordinarily, there may be some issues about Aria’s hippie-dipstick edgy aesthetics clashing with dour old money tradition, but every secondary character behaves like a hive mind in action, so everyone that is to be considered the “good folks” is unanimously in agreement that Aria and Myles are OTP, true love forever and ever, squee. So, in the end, the romance is a snore.
What does stand out to me, in the wrong way, is the overwhelming misogyny permeating the first few chapters.
It’s really bad. Myles attends his sister’s party at the gallery—an event arranged and managed by Aria—with a date set up by his father. The author spends a perplexing amount of words telling me what a brainless, selfish, horrible woman that date is.
It’s perplexing because the justification for such awful treatment of the date by the author is that the date laughs at Aria wearing torn jeans in a formal party.
One, Aria kind of deserves that for not having the common sense to follow the dress code of a party she arranges, especially when she hopes to impress the people attending it into hiring her for future events.
Two, Myles’s family initially laughs at Aria behind her back too, so why is it that the date is the only one being singled out as a villain here?
Oh, and Aria’s mother is the usual psychotic sort, while her father is the browbeaten nice guy that is too good for the psycho mother.
Considering that the psycho mother doesn’t play a big role in the overall plot, I can’t help feeling that she and the date are included in this story to validate readers that have serious mommy issues and a hate complex against thin and beautiful women. Sadly, I am too old and hence too mellow to have these issues seething in my black heart, so consider me unimpressed and unmoved.
All in all, All for You is a boring story without any credible conflict or romantic tension, and it’s populated by hive mind secondary characters that come off as pretty creepy in how they all seem to think and push the same agenda like they all share the same brain.
Clearly, all of this isn’t for me!
