Dorothy Ewels, $1.99, ISBN 978-0639963440
Contemporary Romance, 2019
Ah, only in romance novels, where you can somehow bump into a billionaire at a bar by chance and find true love in the process. That’s Dorothy Ewels’s Destined in a nutshell.
Oh, I suppose I should elaborate a bit more.
Our heroine Serena is bitterly unhappy that she has let her stereotypical more outgoing BFF dragged her into a club when she sees this hot man and, when he seems to be following her, for some reason panics and flees the scene. She then has erotic dreams about him.
That silly thing, she clearly doesn’t read romance novels because when it comes to a hot guy, “creepy” is never a possibility. He’s either a vampire, a Dom looking for a new sub, a billionaire, or all three with a side of secret agent, MC hottie, Mafia boss, or whatever it is that is trending on the Kindle bestseller lists these days. Whatever he is, the only option is to let him have her, and everyone wins!
Well, fortunately for her, he turns up the very next day in her office. Surprise, he’s her new client! She’d be planning his Christmas party and fundraising gala, so they’d be spending a lot of time together.
Okay, there is a big problem here: the lack of a believable reason for the hero, Sebastian Marino, to play ping-pong with Serena’s feelings.
Let’s recap: his father refused to pay for his brother’s ransom when the poor fellow was kidnapped, and the brother ended up dead. The father is now going all “Ooh! Guilt is making me die slowly day by day. Dying, aargh!”
Instead of taking a logical lesson from this, like how you shouldn’t be cheap when it comes to your kids’ lives, our hero instead decides to climb onboard the tedious “Ooh! Relationships suck! I can’t do that, because feelings will hurt me and I will cry like a big bawling baby!” wangst express.
Then there’s also that other angst of his: “Oh, my brother is dead, and now I’m the heir of the family billions, especially since Daddy is dying or something, and the pressure, oh the pressure! I can boink, but I can’t deal with the aftermath, so now that I’ve had fun, get out, get out because it’s all about ME-EEE-EEE!”
What, the author can’t come up with a more reasonable excuse for the hero acting like the king of pumps and dumps? I don’t know, maybe he’s afraid of paying a Jeff Bezos-sized alimony should he get divorced, or perhaps he has a tiny pee-pee and he’d like them to vamoose before it’s broad daylight and they get a good glimpse of his wang?
The hero is hard to empathize with because of his silly whining, and this is an issue because his whining is basically his entire personality, wrapped and labelled “Big baby, eeuw.”
Sure, the heroine dresses him down toward the end for using that “I can’t reach you!” excuse for not contacting her after he has ghosted her for who knows how many times, but unless she’s angling for those billions, I personally don’t see why she should put up with this overgrown crybaby for this long. This is the romance genre, after all, throw a stone at random and one will hit a billionaire. The only thing special about this particular billionaire is what a weenie king he is.
The author’s prose is on the stilted, rather dry side, with an overuse of active voice and not enough variation in the cadence and style to keep things interesting.
Still, this won’t be too much of an issue if the story had featured a more likable hero. Sadly, it has Sir Wet Rag Marino, so the whole thing isn’t a particularly enjoyable or endearing read.
