Kimani, $7.99, ISBN 978-1-335-47098-0
Contemporary Romance, 2019
Aww, at the end of Sheryl Lister’s Designed by Love, which also comes together with Sherelle Green’s Her Christmas Wish, is the announcement that Kimani is no more. Don’t worry, those authors are now writing for the Harlequin Desire line and… yeah, I’m not going to follow them there.
It’s mostly because books in those lines are very hard to find here, aside from the odd old copies usually showing up in used book stores—that’s why you always see reviews of the occasional Modern or Presents title years after the title first came out. Also, in this day and age, for some reason these people still don’t let me legitimately buy digital copies of these titles even if I wanted to. That’s probably for the best, though, as the exchange rate at the moment can make me clutch at my heart in pain.
At any rate, it’s sad to have a physical reminder of the very last Kimani book in my hand. I’ve been following this line as best as I could when it started out as Arabesque, and found some favorite authors in the process. I can only wish that the line went out with fireworks and all, but the truth is, I’ve found many of the titles in the last few years of Kimani to be a chore to wade through.
The titles became increasingly homogenized and the plot points became boiled down to a handful that get repeated every month. I found it hard to tell apart one author from another because the style and tone and even structure of those stories were so, so samey, like they were all churned out by the same AI program.
I would always feel that the downfall of this line was when the people at Harlequin decided to treat Kimani like it was every other series line. Thus, they removed diverse voices of black authors and reduced the line to some black version of… I don’t know, Desire, I suppose, since they had shunted many Kimani authors there. Back in the Arabesque days, there were romantic suspense, small town romance, big city romance, family drama, glitz-lit… and then everything became just workaholic women shagging a bloke at their best friend’s or sister’s wedding in some tropical island non-stop, that and four other story lines that were only allowed in the dark days of Kimani.
However, is the end of Kimani a completely negative thing? I am not sure. Arabesque was a necessary platform at a time when black romance authors wanted to be published, but many publishers believed that the market just wasn’t there unless one wrote urban fiction about either middle-aged black women finding their mojo back or gangster fiction.
Does Kimani still have a place today, though? Self-publishing is easy, and perhaps the average person these days is more colorblind when it comes to romances. Do we need an all-black line of books?
Oh well, there goes Kimani, and there’s that.
Wait, did I forget something? Right, right, I’m supposed to be talking about Sheryl Lister’s story.
So, we have a workaholic heroine, assistant professor Serita Edwards, and robotics company owner Jeremy Hunter (don’t worry, he’s loaded) having a thing during a conference.
Despite him seeing her as a “petite beauty”, Serita claims that she has nothing to offer him but her brains. I know, it’s a first, that the heroine for the first time is lamenting that a man likes her for her intelligence and not her face or curves.
We all know it can’t end after that time, so these two cross paths again, and the conference thing soon becomes a confluence thing (and yes, I have no idea what I have just said) but he doesn’t want to do the commitment thing plus he’s now her employer and… oh, who cares, like we all don’t know that it’s all the rage for bosses to tup their sexy employees in this genre.
After the necessary Wikipedia entry-making of the heroine, the hero, and whatever characters in their vicinity, things actually improve tremendously here once the more contrived plot developments have been placed to get the shagging out of the way.
These two begin to communicate, and this is what the story is most successful at doing: believable interactions between two likable characters; interactions that sell me that these two have a real deal based on mutual love, lust, respect, and trust. The fact that he has lots of money is, of course, icing on the happy cake. There isn’t much here to drive the internal conflict between them—a secondary couple’s pregnancy fears are the more compelling source of drama here—but it is a pleasure to follow the developing relationship of two very likable people with believable chemistry.
To sum things up, Designed by Love starts out like any other contrived Kimani story that bends over backward to fit itself into one of the handful of acceptable plots and tropes of the line, but after the first third or so, things improve by leaps and bounds.
I still have quite a number of Kimani stories to read and review, so this won’t be the last review of titles in that line that will show up here. I’ll also try to follow some of the authors whose stories had struck my fancy to their new homes, but given how PITA it is to get my hands on Harlequin series titles are over here, I can’t promise anything, heh.
Ah, a lot has changed and will continue to change with this genre. Interesting times, indeed.
