Stoked Publishing House, $0.99
Contemporary Romance, 2017
Life is, in many ways, all about our choices.
This is the story of Greta, our heroine, who falls for her father’s best friend Colin, a man twenty-two years her senior.
That’s her choice, and frankly, I don’t blame her. If I were, say, a sane, sensible woman with two functional eyes, and my father’s best friend looks like what Colin is supposed to look like here, I’d cheer myself on and ride that fellow like the last cowgirl on Earth on the very last day of existence.
Unfortunately, the author made her choices here in this story, too, and those choices make the romance resemble a whole evening of weeping into the bottle and then jumping the first thing that one sees after all those drinks. The author has Greta first lose her job and then catch her boyfriend in the middle of having sex with someone else. When our heroine runs home to daddy, only to find Colin there instead, she gets soused before making the move on him. In other words, no matter how much the author tries to pass this off as a romance, it doesn’t change the fact that the heroine needs booze to get in the mood.
To make up for the potential creepy old man factor, the author has Colin calling himself just that and behaving like the most gallant fellow – he only wants to wag that thing at her to help her get over her boyfriend, how sweet – all of which are negated by the author also needing the heroine to be most vulnerable to be shaggable.
In other words, you need to be really out of your head space to want to sleep with a hot, older man, and for some reason, despite this being the current year, the idea of a woman sleeping with a man who is two decades older than her is still something icky. I don’t know. Why not just go for the jugular? Who cares what other people think? Let Greta be a modern woman in control of her own life, and have her have torrid sex with Colin or even her grandfather’s BFF if she wanted to. Women have been sleeping with much older men for ages, so it’s not like this whole relationship is groundbreaking taboo.
Oh, right, he’s her father’s best friend and business partner. Seriously, though, we have all seen rich people in this world do weird and often bizarre things, and marrying one’s father’s BFF ranks low on the list of the antics of only the rich and crazy.
What I’m saying is that the author could have chosen to have her heroine just do what she wants to do, and have these two howl at the moon while swaying naked from chandelier to chandelier. Celebrate the sexy, and if some people would find the idea of such a coupling icky, well, tough – let’s put on a sexy show and make them flee in terror, heh.
Instead, the author seems to lack confidence in her own story – she has the heroine drunk when she’s horny, Colin tries too hard to apologize for finding the heroine sexy, and I end up wondering whether the author wants me to like this story or not. If the author didn’t have the brass to own this premise, best stick to the usual characters in the usual setting then.
