Kimani, $6.25, ISBN 978-0-373-86259-7
Contemporary Romance, 2012
It all begins with Danica Austin being persuaded by her friend Ashlyn to swap homes for a month. Ashlyn would move into Danica’s Chicago pad and Danica would head on down to Ashlyn’s very luxurious and super-amazing beachfront house in Hilo, Hawaii. Danica decides to take this time to relax and, hopefully, find some hot guy to hook up with – in a true love thing, of course, because she’s not that kind of girl, oh no.
Ashlyn’s half-brother Boyd Reed doesn’t think much of this arrangement, however, as he suspects that Danica must have manipulated his half-sister into trading down her expensive home for some mere pad in Chicago. He’d keep an eye out on that hussy… who turns out to be so tall and so hot that she’d make Rihanna look like a fat cow in comparison, so all of a sudden, he just wants to get into her pants and she’s not such a bad person after all. Men, and some of them wonder why we consider them so easy to manipulate.
That’s basically the plot. Aloha Fantasy starts out pretty tough to read because the author has a tendency to cram as many details as he can in very long running sentences. He soon gets into his groove however, and the sentences become shorter and easier to read as the story progresses.
This story is almost therapeutic to read because it’s so low key. Okay, the main characters are stock “hot girl” and “hot rich guy” types that I have come across many times before, and they are so rich and so gorgeous that it is hard to consider them human beings. But the story focuses on their courtship in a such a way that the story is a pleasant kind of vacation from the usual inept suspense, crazy evil other ho, and incessant parade of scenery-chewing sequel baits that riddle too many books in the Kimani line. This one is just about the romance, and it’s nice.
The niceness can be a double-edged sword of sorts, though, because this is also a very slow moving story, and as a result, I find it very easy to put the book down when I am distracted by something prettier or flashier. This is also one of those stories where the author would have done better not to include some conflict at all. The characters seem to have something good here, so the late conflict seem perfunctory and out of character, as if this is included solely as a wake-up call for readers who may have fallen asleep by then.
Aloha Fantasy is an okay read, perhaps a little too “just okay” for its own good as it’s probably not something I’d remember shortly after I’ve put this book away.
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