Kimani, $7.99, ISBN 978-1-335-47099-7
Contemporary Romance, 2019

Christmas with the Billionaire is the conclusion to Niobia Bryant’s series about the Ansah siblings. There’s Alek, then there’s Naim, and now it’s time for the baby sister Samira to show off what a girl boss she is.

Wait, did I say “girl boss”? Like the previous two stories, this one unintentionally demonstrates how silly women with their lady brains are only good for fetching coffee and taking dictation, maybe cleaning up the office now and then, while the men do all the actual running of a billion-dollar business.

As the daughter of billionaires, Samira’s sole ambition is life is to be allowed to play in the upper management of the family business. She is CEO material, she really is! To prove this, she is going to do something very CEO: she will personally go seek out Emerson Lance Miller to get him to sell them a property needed to the betterment of the business.

That’s right. This billion-dollar company can’t hire a battalion of lawyers to bribe politicians into finding loopholes that will allow them to seize the property or anything like that. No, the future CEO girl boss is going to do something that is best left to an underling, because she is… er, dedicated and hands on, I suppose.

Something tells me Samira can’t even spell “nepotism” correctly.

She is soon mistaken by Lance for someone applying to be his personal assistant, so our heroine abandons her usual job at the office to pose as “Samantha Aston”, his new PA. Well, she’s definitely CEO material in that regard: she’s off to play while some poor underlings will have to do her job in her absence.

She is good at being PA, and in the process, Lance falls for our CEO of Secretaries. He has a lot of angst about a tragic past love, however, so how will he react when the truth inevitably comes out?

Despite wanting to be a co-CEO of her family business, our heroine spends more time moaning about love and whether any man she hooks up with is going to be the one. In this regard, she is similar to the awful heroines of the previous stories—the author insists that these are all girl boss material, but what I see instead are women far more concerned about the traffic into their hoo-hoo and heart.

In fact, in the opening page, Samira is already whining about wanting a balanced work life so that she can find her dream man too. This means that she is going to be that boss that leaves early every day because she needs to take a break from all her stress, and some poor underlings are going to have to pick up her crap in her absence.

The more I see our heroine in action, the more I cringe at how she is making a good case for people that believe women just don’t have the head for running a business. Yikes!

I wonder whether Lance smuggles drugs on the side, because this is an author that also has this big-ass house with its own elevator. He spends his days fishing when he’s not writing… seriously, what is his real job? Flesh trafficking?

The romance is bizarrely done. The author is very fond of skipping the story between chapters to two weeks later, another two weeks, sometimes for a longer time jump. It’s as if she couldn’t wait for this story to be done too.

As a result of this, the romance feels truncated and rushed at places, culminating in a bizarre scenario in which the heroine is the one giving ultimatums to the hero, when she’s the one that should be apologizing for her deception. The author is really bending over backward here to make sure the heroine isn’t only repeatedly and undeservedly praised as an awesome girl boss; Samira isn’t even supposed to be held accountable for her actions, it seems.

At any rate, this one has a crap premise that makes zero sense in the business environment of present day, presents the concept of capable women in that environment in the most contrary and embarrassing manner, and offers a half-baked romance to boot.

I don’t have fun reading this thing, and considering the way the story jumps forward a few weeks every two or three chapters, I suspect the author didn’t have a great time writing this either.