Dee James, $2.99, ISBN 979-8215642528
Contemporary Romance, 2022
I have to admit, Dee James has quite the guts to call this story Cheesy Love. It has a fat, sorry, curvy romance heroine and has “cheese” in the title. It’s like the author is daring people to make fat jokes about this thing.
TeknoFoods, Inc is setting up an office in Hyderabad—yes, this story is set in India—and our hero Alessandro Davolli is sent to be the boss of that office because he smeared his cheese onto the mistress of someone… well, let’s just say that the fellow isn’t going to be happy when he learns that the gelato on his side piece isn’t his.
Meanwhile, our heroine Kiara Bhatia is a college grad that gets a job there because she is apparently so talented and amazing that she can have any pick of her post there and she picks marketing analyst because marketing and research is her passion.
I can only hope that she’s more competent than those imbeciles that make TikTok videos of how they were paid so much at Google just to spend an entire day eating imported bratwurst sandwiches, enjoying massages, and making dumb videos announcing to all and sundry how overpaid and useless they are.
Now, crux of the romantic conflict here is that Kiara gets on Sandros’s nerves at first because she is too clever for him or something. However, the author reveals that she may not be that well-versed in the topic that she’s tacking on to her story.
“I think we should launch our variety of cheese in smaller packaging apart from the sizes quoted here.”
“Smaller packages?” I wasn’t sure if she was joking. “Why? Do you think people should go out and buy cheese every time they cook? That is not even enough cheese for a single meal for a family of four.”
“My point is…”
I frowned at her interruption. As a rule, I hated interruptions and when it happened because of a slip of a girl who thought she knew it all, it only served to jar my nerves. Instead of letting her complete her thought, I ruthlessly cut her off. “No, any smaller and we’d end up spending far more on packaging and transportation.”
“Sandros, I think Kiara has a point there,” Matteo, my senior research analyst, quickly pitched in.
Wait, how does Matteo know that Kiara has a point? She just said that the packaging should be smaller, but never really explained why.
That’s a pattern that is present throughout the rest of the story. There are always some details missing between jumps from paragraph to paragraph, as if the author is a little farther ahead than her reader but she assumes that the reader can still perfectly keep up.
Because of this, the story can be pretty rough to read, as I find myself jarred from my reading often to sniff at how scenes to have jumped abruptly from point A to C while skipping point B altogether.
It also doesn’t help that the author has a style that is best described as one extreme or the other. The characters here lurch from bloody stupid to bloody… whatever it is that is the opposite of stupid, but I hesitate to use the word “smart” to describe these characters either.
Sandros suffers the worst of the two main characters, as for way too long here he is this dumb and rude SOB that cuts off the heroine at mid-sentence and acts like a spoiled brat because he is essentially banished to this Indian office.
Yet, the heroine finds him attractive. Why? Well, the author has jumped from point A to H and missed all the points in between when it comes to that aspect of the story.
I want to give the author the benefit of the doubt here. Maybe the characters swing wildly from one extreme to another, acting like everything they say and do need to be punctuated by at least three exclamation marks, because the author wants to emulate the melodramatic vibe of an Indian movie? Heaven knows, most mainstream Indian movies that aren’t trying to win awards from white people are anything but subtle.
Still, whatever the author’s intention may be, the end result is still something that feels super rough around the edges, along with a strong whiff of amateurism.
