Kimani, $7.99, ISBN 978-1-335-47097-3
Contemporary Romance, 2019
At this rate, I will be happy to never review anything else by Pamela Yaye, as I’m just going to be repeating myself with every review. Before anyone gives me the side eye, let me point out that the only reason I read Decadent Holiday Pleasures is because it comes packaged with Janice Sims’s His Christmas Gift. After reading the story that I paid for, I set this book aside, trying to ignore that thing that is stuck at the hindquarters of His Christmas Gift, until I mistakenly placed this book into my bag for my trip to the newly-reopened, post-quarantine hairdresser for some much-needed hair TLC.
Sigh.
Basically, this is another Kimani-approved honey-don’t-you-dare-write-anything-else LOL the-line-is-really-dead-now story. Elise Jennings gets interviewed for a job, the hot boss Giovanni Castillo wants to job her, and because she is so sexy, he insists that she can’t be hired and throws a petulant temper tantrum when his sister insists that Elise is the best for the job. Mind you, our hero wonders why no one takes him seriously when it comes to business stuff, and I for one can’t imagine the reason. Oh, and he has been burned before, thanks to some skanky ho ditching him once it seemed like his polo career would be stalled forever, so any woman that foolishly lets him shag her is now ten seconds away from being called a prostitute for putting out to him. Then, it turns out that our hero’s cousin tried to job the heroine a while back, and now he and his sister side with the obviously sleazy SOB – the SOB even uses disrespectful synonyms for skank to describe Elise like he would be paid a hundred dollars for each time he does it – until he’s like, OH, MY BAD, and she then quickly decides that she loves him now, the end.
If you think that is an overwhelmingly interesting must-read story, knock yourself out. You may have noticed that I didn’t give any specific details about the main characters’ jobs or what not. Well, does it matter? This is another template Kimani story, so it remains the same whether the heroine is a chef – which Elise is here – or a schoolteacher or whatever that is placed under the tiny list of acceptable jobs for romance heroines in a contemporary romance. If the author wanted to address the issue of sexual harassment on the job, well, this one has the heroine’s happy ending hinging on whether the hero believes her or not, so it’s not exactly an empowering take if you ask me. “Oh, stand up for #MeToo, stand up for #BelieveAllWomen… but it’s totally okay if the romance hero crapped all over me so long as he decided in the end that I’m hot and sexy enough for him. Woo-hoo I’ve now attained the final form of #Feminism!”
Once again, also, the author writes like she is unable to focus on anything for longer than three sentences. In one scene, the hero launches into an internal monologue about how he needs a haircut. Oh, he’s going for a haircut soon with his BFF! The author then describes the BFF like he would matter in this story (nope – just padding), the guy’s background and what not. Who cares? Then the hero looks at his watch for the time, and then he thinks about helping his sister interview candidates for the chef job. This leads to a rambling tangent into how his father never had faith in him as a businessman, and then… oh, the sunlight shining through the window is too bright, making Jonas remember how he’s sensitive to light and experiences migraine regularly because of his injuries while playing polo.
Now we go off in the next sentence to the description of the restaurant, which then sees Jonas cutting off to think about his sister for two lines. Then he gets a text message and chuckles. Why is he chuckling? I will never know because the author never tells me. Instead, Jonas sees whom the text is from and then talks about how the last chef had a heart attack, nearly died, and is now retiring. Wait, is that why he’s chuckling? He must really hate that old man.
What I’ve described took place in a space of five short paragraphs.
Also, the author’s fruit loop logic is back.
For example, Elise is talking during her interview, and Jonas’s mind starts to wander into the rambling thought train that I’ve just described. He only comes back to the present when he hears Elise speaking in Spanish. Now, Jonas and his sister are speaking in English. Nobody else in the scene is talking to Elise. So why is she suddenly blabbing in Spanish? Again, I will never know, as this is just an excuse invented by the author – to have Jonas resume paying attention to Elise after the author has run out of exposition to poop out on the pages. Maybe the restaurant is haunted and all of a sudden Elise is possessed by some Spaniard demon, like this is a sequel to The Conjuring or something? Oh, that would have made the story far more interesting, I tell you.
The hero’s response to the sudden babble of Spanish is to tell Elise that oh, she speaks Spanish, before everyone resumes talking in English.
No really, what is that all about?
Scenes such as this one are present all over the story, often making me stop and go, “No, really, what is the author going on about this time?” The only way the author’s apparent madness makes sense would be that huge chunks of the story had been hastily cut because of length constraints. If not, oh well, the author wouldn’t be Pamela Yaye otherwise, I guess.
At any rate, at this point I’ve been exposed enough to the author’s shudder-inducing writing style to actually find amusement from the whole thing – at the author’s expense, sadly. Still, I’d prefer to be amused with an author, not by, because romance novels aren’t Looney Tunes cartoons. So yes, here’s a review of another story by Pamela Yaye, and I have a feeling that I won’t be reading anything else by her for a long while.
