Asrai Devin, $2.99
Contemporary Romance, 2014
Darren Lowery’s ex-wife is ordered by the court to go to rehab after one too many DUI charges, and now he has a daughter, Claire, to take care of. Despite apparently having little to do with his daughter for the last three years, he’d have you know that his ex-wife is the terrible one of the two, and he’s the daddy of the year. So what our daddy of the year does is to look for a nanny for the daughter. Hey, he’s paying for the nanny – that counts, okay?
Eliza Kaplow is a free-styling, tree-hugging type with dreadlocks and all. There’s a capitalist punchline in there somewhere because she is also broke and homeless. Applying to be a nanny despite having plenty of trust issues is her best option, and she immediately bursts into tears once she’s hired because all she has ever wanted in her life is a soul mate, a home, and a family, and now everything seems so close yet so far away.
Sigh. If Can’t Run from Love ended up being one of those Lifetime movies with Liz being the psycho nanny, things may actually be fun, but no, this is a romance. The trouble here is that this is an overwrought romance with characters always being over the top with everything. Darren is always angry about his ex-wife and everything, while Liz mopes so much like some teary-eyed, emotionally unstable Eeyore on crack. The daughter is of course as creepy as can be – she’s like an adult crammed into a kid’s body, sounding way too hard to be a cute kid and failing in every respect. Conversations feel more like anguished declarations to one’s shrink.
The whole thing resembles a Debbie Macomber story, if that story had main characters with wild mood swings that have deliberately avoiding taking their medications for a year or two. Everything is too over, too much, and the author structures her story in such a way that the whole thing feels like a contrived with puppet strings obviously pulled by the author. I almost thought this was a debut effort, until I realized this one is at the tail end of a long series. Yikes.
