Jill Sanders, $4.99, ISBN 978-1481208727
Contemporary Romance, 2012

Jill Sanders’s Discovering Pride is part of a series just called Pride, but ah, that is because this story—the whole series, actually—is set in Pride, Oklahoma. Nothing to do with the parade of rainbow-colored alphabets at all, in other words, so people hoping that the bloke-ish fellow on the cover is a trans man and the woman-ish fellow is a non-binary genderqueer may want to look elsewhere.

Folks looking for romance with a conflict that has some degree of gravity may want to look elsewhere, too.

By the way, the file I am reading after having downloaded it is called Coloring Pride. Is that the original title of this story? That one sounds infantile, but it fits the story better, as the heroine is basically a special woman-child running around and sprinkling her brand of manic pixie dust in ways that I personally find obnoxious.

Meet Lacey Brown. She is described by the author as a free-spirited woman in her twenties, whose true love at the moment is her three-and-a-half-year old Labrador Retriever, Bernard. She is free-spirited because she runs wild among the grasses and dips in the pond.

As she floated in the water, her short black hair bobbed around her face, a face often described as pixie-like. Her straight nose was, in her opinion, her best asset, but most people claimed it was her crystal slate eyes that stood out the most. An artist who had once painted her, compared her to an exotic creature from beyond this world.

A small crease formed between her eyebrows at the thought of being compared to an exotic or even mythical creature. It happened often and she was getting tired of it. To her, she was just Lacey, a down-to-earth woman in her mid-twenties whom, at this point, had yet to fall in love.

Oh yes, the truly special snowflake that keeps insisting that she’s just a plain old ordinary gal that wants love, even as the author at the same time insists that this snowflake is indeed the most special-est of the specials.

Most people in her town knew she had an uncanny way of predicting what was going to happen. Sometimes it seemed like she could even control the outcome. However, she felt that she just paid attention to everything more than others normally did.

Sigh, can I just stop here? No? I paid money for this and I better finish reading it and doing the review? Ugh.

Aaron Stevens was restless, hot, and sweaty. And he was horny. His need reminded him it had been over seven months since his breakup with Jennifer. He’d spent the last few days hammering away on his house, spending all his pent up anger and hurt on demolition. Now, however, he was still hot, angry, sweaty, and horny.

Ah yes, the ever-popular pairing of a wide-eyed child-woman and a horny man. I feel a scream building up in my throat already.

Aaron is the new doctor in town, and Lacey hates him. She says that he’s disrupting life in Pride, but I personally think she’s just mad that she’s no longer the center of attention.

The two of them have a thing for throwing off their clothes and jumping into bodies of water whenever they feel like it, and that’s how they meet, when a naked Aaron grabs a naked Lacey and she goes all what is he doing aaahhh and he’s like heh heh heh, what has he reeled in, ho ho ho. He makes to kiss her until he finally hears the panic in her voice and briefly lets her go. Hey, don’t forget, he’s hot, so it can never be creepy, only sexy, when he does such a thing.

Lacey tugged her hand free and put it behind her back again, trying to not look guilty. She hadn’t done anything that would make her feel ashamed. It was, after all, her private swimming hole. She grew up swimming in it every summer. It was Aaron who should be feeling guilty. After all, who was he to jump naked in her pond?

See? Even the special snowflake agrees. She’s far more upset about “her” pond being intruded upon than she is at being molested. When the guy is hot, you lay back and try to enjoy because that is what true love is.

Aaron took a good look at her; she was smaller than he’d first thought. Her head was below his shoulders, and with her tiny frame she looked very delicate.

A delicate snowflake. This just gets better.

Aaron walked beside her. He had gotten the impression from Todd and Megan that she was usually in charge of, well, everything. It was nice to see her jump, when he had brushed up against her as he reached for a dish.

Always remember: it’s not creepy when the guy is hot.

To his credit, for what it is worth, Aaron later apologizes for his actions, but the author ruins the whole scene by having Lacey blink at him in confusion. That is another issue I have with this story: the author for some reason has Lacey constantly flustered, acting “tightly”, feeling fear or panic even in Aaron’s company that the whole thing feels more like a lead-up to a Lifetime woman-in-danger movie than a romance novel.

It does not help that her thought process is on the “special” side. She calling him “Doctor” only adds to this sense of vast discrepancy in terms of power in the dynamics of those two.

The Doctor had left after filling himself with a full plate of appetizers, a huge steak and shrimp dinner, and a plate of apple pie a la mode.

She had two brothers, so she knew what it took to feed a man. However, she guessed that neither Todd or Iian would’ve packed away as much food
as Aaron just had.

The romance takes what seems like forever to get anywhere, as the author has no shortage of extraneous characters and their daily happenings to bombard me with. When those two do hook up, our heroine predictably whines that she’s not like those models and hot hos that he used to “date” back in the big city, so oh, she has better push him away. The author has already drenched me with cringe-inducing paragraphs after paragraphs of what an ethereal beauty our heroine is, so this is just another tedious exercise to have the hero insist to her that yes, she is indeed the most perfect woman in the world.

I’ve just scratched the tip of the iceberg when it comes to my issues with this story. I’d be here until Christmas if I had to go into detail, so here’s the CliffsNotes summary:

• Characters always explain everything they do and feel to the people around them. This creates the impression that everyone in Pride is an insufferable narcissist that only likes and knows how to talk about themselves.
• Many long interior monologues that only serve to rehash details already set down a few times already in the story. Worse, these characters all think like children, such as Lacey’s thoughts about Aaron’s appetite, above, so it’s not like the repetition allows for some riveting reading.
• These characters think like children but have adult libidos. The combination is creepy as can be.
• The internal conflict boils down to silly misunderstanding, rush to wrong conclusions, and other nonsense caused by the characters’ inability to have an adult’s perspective on life.
• The many secondary characters have barely any discernible personality; they exist to fill up space with banal conversations, act as cheerleaders, or serve as convenient mouthpieces for the author to tell Aaron and Lacey what to do and how to think.

You know, writing this review has been a downer of an experience so I’ll just stop here. Discovering Pride should have just remained hidden from polite society.