KB Press, $3.99, ISBN 978-0463149591
Contemporary Romance, 2018
Katie Anderson is a dirty cop, but I think she probably is dumb enough to never ask for a share of her pie, because she is evicted from her apartment two weeks before Christmas for failing to pay rent for two months.
Well, another possibility is that all her money went up her nose, but Kat Bellemore’s Borrowing Amor is marketed as a wholesome romance, so our heroine likely doesn’t do that.
Moron it is, or rather, Katie is, then.
Her fellow dirty cops all go “Nuh-uh, you’re on your own, toots!” so with a fake ID, Katie drove off somewhere to start a new life.
Yes, you guessed right, her car breaks down near the most perfect small town ever, Amor in New Mexico, and she soon gets a job—one that she is not qualified for, naturally—with the hot mayor, Sam Freedman (ooh, deep, that name), and falls for him because of plot. Ah, but will her past catch up with her and ruin her fun?
Now, the reader’s reception to Borrowing Amor will hinge on their reaction to Katie’s “redemption”, which is so paper thin that it may as well be there at all.
From the very beginning, our heroine is presented as a dirty cop that also happens to be penniless, morose, has no friends, and likely have not many brain cells either. In other words, she’s already painted as a victim on page one, and somehow that should be enough to make me sympathize with her.
No, I’m actually horrified by this, because a poor-as-dirt dirty cop is a failure of epic proportions. Can someone just put this wretch down as an act of kindness?
Back to the story, Katie’s “redemption” is basically her finding a lovely place where everyone is so nice to her, giving her a job and a place to stay mostly out of charity, and therefore she can finally “change” to be a better person.
That’s my problem with this one: Katie’s “redemption” is kick-started by chance (or the act of God if you want to view things that way) and the rest is handed to her by the people she meets. There is no initiative or agency of her own in changing to be a better person; this is redemption forced upon her by plot.
The rest of the story is standard new girl, besieged by problems, in a super lovely town that accepts her and what not. That aspect of the story is okay, if somewhat predictable.
What is not okay is the emotional non-development of the main characters in this one. The heroine gets everything handed to or done for her, and the pinnacle of her so-called redemption arc is her insisting that she has changed. That’s all. The hero forgives her lies in a heartbeat, and the only person that is cynical about Katie’s character improvement is painted as the villain.
The whole thing is really as deep as a puddle.
So, why has a story of this sort if the author wanted to make things as easy as possible for the heroine? Why not make Katie, say, someone skipping town with a guilty conscience because she couldn’t afford to pay the library fine or something? That kind of silliness will be more appropriate for the too-simple portrayal of redemption and finding of a second chance at life presented here.
