Kimani, $6.50, ISBN 978-0-373-86397-6
Contemporary Romance, 2015
Monica Richardson also writes as Monica McKayhan, by the way. While she is certainly no novice, An Island Affair is her official debut as Monica Richardson. This is an “I” book – both the hero Jackson Conner and the heroine Jasmine Talbot take turns to go, “I, I, I…”
Jasmine comes back to her hometown in the Eleuthera Island, which is somewhere in the Bahamas. You know how it is, she went to America to make it big as an actress, but she is soon jaded by the superficial artifice of the people there (read: she was a flop when it comes to getting acting gigs, ha ha) so she comes back to this lovely place where everything is clean and simple. She and her brother Edward would transform the family home into a B&B. However, her plans for renovation do not seem to sink in with the developer Jackson, a “visionary contractor” (don’t ask, I have no idea what that means – maybe he builds houses with obscene-shaped roofs or something), who has no respect for women because all those bitches, starting from his mother all the way to his last lying cheating ho, are not worthy, and he’d rather deal with Edward directly. Of course, his misogyny is no match for Jasmine’s honeypot power, and he’s soon going from misogyny to soggy knees when it comes to Jasmine.
After reading the first few chapters where Jackson is all “ho this, ho that, bitches me, bitches you”, I have flashbacks to some of the most one-dimensional, oh-so-boring new adult stories where it is always that feisty dingbat going all dewy-eyed when confronted with sexual harassment by a hot asshole, and she ends up proving to said asshole that, while his mother is a hag and all women are hos, she’s the exception to the rule because the honeypot is special so it’s the happy ending, the end. I immediately stocked up on alcohol and ice cream just in case I get too distressed halfway through the story.
Fortunately, Jasmine’s dazzling charms soon melt Jackson’s ho-bag fixation and the man soon transforms into a more agreeable kind of fellow. But you know what they say about being careful of what one wishes for – while this story turns out to be pretty gentle on my nerves, there is nothing much of interest happening in this story on the whole. These two see things, meet agreeable people, discuss their trust and family issues, work out those issues, the end. Basically, An Island Affair follows the same formula applied to many other similar casual “beautiful people taking their time to have sex, go places, meet sequel baits and say hi” stories in this line. The last handful of chapters when these characters deal with their issues are mildly interesting in that at least something is happening in those chapters, but, again, nothing I’ve never read many times before.
Ultimately, An Island Affair is not a bad read, but it also so predictable and ordinary that it sort of fades into the background after a while.
