Tee Smith, $0.99, ISBN 978-0648467939
Contemporary Romance, 2018
The guy on the cover of Tee Smith’s An Irish Contract has some weird rashes on his upper left arm. Oh dear, does he need to see a dermatologist STAT?
Mind you, I think he needs to instead get sucked up into a UFO so that the aliens can replace him with a much nicer clone, but that’s just me.
Anyway, the story. Our Australian heroine Isla Finnegan comes over to Ireland, to the reading of her late grandmother Molly Mae O’Reilly’s will.
If you say, “Oh, I bet she will have to share the house with an ex!” then yes, you’re either a professor of romance trope-o-logy or you have read way too many romance stories.
Naturally, Isla is aghast at the idea of staying at the same house with Darcy, but oh, that house is worth a lot of money she can’t bear to see the house fall into the hands of greedy developers!
Heaven forbid we give the heroine a more believable reason to subject herself to the whims of plot. No, let’s make her a soft-hearted nincompoop instead!
This is a tough read. It’s not because it is badly written; rather, the romance has this weird condescending paternal vibe to it.
Darcy and the other men in this story treat Isla like an imbecile that can’t be allowed to make any decision on her own, so this is one story where the hero literally takes the heroine’s arm now and then to make her go where he wants her to.
Now, Isla’s protests about this treatment escalate as the story progresses, making me believe for a long time that this story will lead me to a point of Isla telling off everyone here and giving Darcy the ultimatum to treat her like an adult or go eat sand. Of course, I wonder why she doesn’t just walk away from that douchebag, but I’m willing to play along and see where the author will take the story.
Well, at the last minute, there is some abruptly introduced mystery subplot that culminates with Isla deciding that Darcy is perfectly fine as he is and she’d marry him again. Oh, and Molly Mae is also perfectly in the right to strong arm Isla from beyond the grave to get back with her ex-husband because look, Isla is now happy.
Overall, there is a weird patriarchal cult-like feel to this romance, as it ends up validating all those assholes that strip Isla of any agency or control over her own life, and having Isla applaud them for this. She even feels so much gratitude to Darcy being in her life again, and I can only try my best to suppress my gag reflex upon reading the final paragraph of this story.
File this under not my cup of tea. I’ll always be puzzled, though, by how the author has Isla try so hard to assert herself, only to then do a 180 in her own story like that. Am I missing something here? Did someone else read the story and then slapped the author’s wrist for daring to suggest that a woman has the right to make her own decisions?
