Kimani, $7.99, ISBN 978-1-335-00586-1
Contemporary Romance, 2019
Aww, Capture My Heart is JM Jeffries’s final Kimani romance—dead line, RIP, etc—but hey, this is a fine way to sashay away to the exit.
Lennox McCarthy is a talented toy designer that goes solo to start her own thing after her beloved mentor retired. Tolbert Toys’s new owners, the mentor’s son and the son’s wife, are far more concerned about making as much money as possible, and she’d rather be chasing her own passions and other fun things that are usually pursued by people that are either fictitious or they are so rich that they don’t make to work for money.
Unfortunately, the meanie owners then proceed to sue Lennox once she has her own business up and again, accusing her to stealing their IP. Oops.
Fortunately, the man she has had always been crushing on, Matteus Torres, is available to defend her.
Matteus is a widower, and this story is a marvelous example of how a widower can find love again without the author murdering the reputation of the dead wife or downplaying the hero’s love for this dead wife just to make the heroine “the one” for him.
No, Camille will always mean a lot to him, but he also accepts that it is time to move on and build a new future with Lennox.
Readers that want the man to have only the heroine in his heart may not like this, but I personally find this approach resonates more with me. Perhaps it’s because I’m ancient and jaded, but I find the whole “I used to love my dead wife, but oh my god, I learn now how she cheated on me with all of my friends and she also told them my pee-pee is puny, so now I hate her and love the new heroine best!” trope tad childish and even absurd.
Matteus is a man that has loved true and strong, and I find that a reassuring sign that he will love Lennox the same way too. He’s a much more attractive romance hero because of this!
Lennox is a nice romance heroine to root for, as she is smart, sensible, and free of weird neurotic tics that remind me of those crazy-eyed people on TikTok that chronicle constantly every second of their melodramatically awful love lives. She and Matteus get along well and they also communicate well too. All in all, they make a nice couple.
However, I soon forget that Lennox is being sued, and I think these characters half-forget too, as the story focuses a lot of more romantic aspects of their lives and bewilderingly little on the whole lawsuit angle. Now, I like reading about these sweet little moments, but the law suit kick-starts the whole story, so it’s tad disorienting to see how little these characters take the lawsuit seriously or even care.
Maybe the author should have come up with a different plot to get Lennox and Matteus together? They could have just bumped into one another at a store and talked, for example. Perhaps their hook-up app tell them that they should get together for some nookie?
Still, no matter. This is a smart and romantic story, featuring characters that I can adore and root for. If JM Jeffries wanted to exit the Kimani stage with panache and a high note, this is certainly one way to do it with style!
