Kimani, $6.50, ISBN 978-0-373-86310-5
Contemporary Romance, 2013
Yahrah St John’s Delicious Destiny concludes the multi-author trilogy The Draysons: Sprinkled with Love, but this book can stand alone very well. Well, it certainly stands alone in the sense that you won’t get lost if you read this book without having read the previous two books. When it comes to standing, however, this book is a complete mess because the author doesn’t seem to get how crazy the heroine Shari Drayson comes off as. She passes off that brand of crazy as “goodness” while pinning the blame on the hero Grant Robinson’s ex-wife.
Five years ago, Shari was so happy that she finally got to breathe within a few inches of her crush, Grant, that she got drunk by the end of the date and happily put out. Oh, she’s not a whore – don’t be judgmental, people, Shari was a virgin. The whore is that former BFF of hers, Dina English, and don’t you all forget that. Anyway, after the happy moment, Shari is plagued by self-doubts. Surely Grant wouldn’t love someone like her, so oh, she’d better cut things off before things got worse! Meanwhile, Grant wanted to apologize for taking advantage of her when she was drunk, and he’d like to start all over again. Like having sex on the second date with her sober, I guess. But Shari gave him the “let’s forget about it, and thanks for the bang” speech so he decided that she was some kind of whore after all and that Dina was so much nicer.
As usual, Shari got knocked up, but she saw Dina and Grant holding hands so she decided to withdraw from the scene and added another point to the statistic of Stupid Baby Mommas in Romance Novels.
Today, they meet again. Grant is conveniently divorced from Dina – he never loved her, she was so mean, blah blah blah – and he’d like to have sex with Shari again, especially with her sober. He soon finds out that he is the father of her son. Shari has been obsessed with Grant all these years, and she is so happy that he is divorced from that whore, but alas, when he wants to marry her, she knows that this is the worst thing that can ever happen because he doesn’t love her. Of course, that whore shows up now and then to remind me that she’s a whore and Dina’s the good girl and every other woman in this world is a whore compared to Shari so, no matter how much of an imbecile Shari is, she’s the perfect woman for Grant. And there are just so many whores in this world, shudder.
Here’s the thing: Shari cut things off with Grant five years ago. She did this on her own. No one forced her to do this. And yet, she spends the entire book blaming Dina for “ruining her life” (her exact words) and “destroying the chance of them being a family”. Shari told Grant that she was responsible for cutting him out, but she certainly doesn’t behave like she believes that, as she constantly blames Dina for everything that is wrong in her life. This wrong-headedness, coupled to Shari’s oh-so-so-stupid behaviour throughout the story, makes this story an excruciating read.
The author seems to believe that Dina is to blame for Shari’s problems by amping up Dina’s nasty-woman status to the point of Dina being a Scooby-Doo villain that is ridiculously all-powerful in her plot to destroy Shari. Worse, she rewards Shari – whose rampant stupidity in this book drives me up the wall – by having Shari being promoted to CFO of the family business at the end of the day. Shari, who has shown no sense of business, good judgment, or even halfway decent instincts or brainpower, as a CFO. Think about that for a minute.
Grant isn’t too bad a guy compared to that imbecile he wants to spend the rest of his life with, but come on now, the author labors under the impression that it’s okay if he treats Dina like crap because Dina is the other woman. He doesn’t love Dina, he married her only because his family pressured him to marry, et cetera. No wonder Dina betrayed Shari’s grandmother and started her own bakery. If I were in her shoes, I’d do the same and pinch staff from that hag’s company out of spite. Like Shari, though, he blames Dina for so many things that he voluntarily did. Things are definitely going wrong here when the designated whore of the story comes off as far more sympathetic than the designated stars of the story.
There is just too much dumb in this story. The main couple jump into all kinds of miscommunication and wrong assumptions because they are gullible and dumb, and when they discover how stupid they have been, they blame everyone else for the nonsense they get themselves into all on their own. If this story had been a building, I’d say it’s time someone takes a wrecking ball to it. Delicious Destiny is so awful that I actually feel embarrassed for having read it from start to finish.
