Shala Mungroo, $3.99, ISBN 979-8215661222
Contemporary Romance, 2023

Shala Mungroo’s Blue-Eyed Devil is another one of those stories with a butt-ugly heroine that deserves our pity.

Sure I was pretty enough I suppose, having been the product of good genes. I had long black hair and sapphire blue eyes exactly like my brother, but my frame was more willowy than curvy and more than once I’d been told I had the body of an editorial model- but I was still too self conscious to put myself out there like that.

Sad, isn’t it? Ah, someone please bring out the world’s smallest violin so that I can take it and ram it down Catarina De Angelis’s throat.

Some 12 years ago when she was a teenager, she developed the hots for her brother’s friend, Aidan Callaghan.

Today, she is a 28-year girlboss running her father’s expansive business empire, but to her dismay, Aidan still won’t put out to her. He sees her as his BFF’s little sister, and sadly for Cat, little sisters don’t exactly get Aidan in the mood for shagging. Ooh, will she eventually get what she wants?

This one isn’t a particularly long story, but oh my god, the whole thing is a painfully protracted mess of characters engaging in petulant, tepid exchanges and behaving like children.

Cat and Aidan are so painfully privileged and pampered that there is no interesting drama to distract them from their tedious pull-and-push games. For a woman supposed to be running a business empire, our heroine doesn’t even seem to spend time at work!

Worse, there is no good reason why these two can’t just start shagging and shorten the story by at least two-third of its current length, so they just go on and on and on in their circular musical chair game until finally, they have no choice but to sit on one another and do the dirty, phew.

The author then introduces some tepid, rushed corporate meanie subplot that is quickly disposed of because the whole point is to have the girlboss become a damsel in distress needing rescue.

Throughout it all, I get even more bored by the author’s constant praising of Cat, while Cat at the same time sighs and says, really, she’s not that amazing before rattling off how awesome she is. There’s also the predictable putting down of other hot women, making this entire story more of a monologue of a pick-me girl desperate to be seen as humble yet awesome. Mood: completely unimpressed.

Oh, and since Cat doesn’t seem to do any actual work here, her so-called intelligence and business acumen is more informed than anything else.

Still, I don’t think the author is a complete lost cause, as from a technical standpoint, this one is alright.

It’s just that the story has no compelling conflict, romantic or otherwise, to go on for as long as it does, and the heroine’s first person narration is grating to follow because Cat is such a disingenuous try-hard that is nowhere as smart and charismatic as the author would like to believe.

Oh well, the drawing board is always open for business.