Natasha Stories, $0.99, ISBN 9781386022510-
Contemporary Romance, 2018
It’s my fault, as I thought the bloke on Natasha Stories’s Dusty was an angel at first. Then it turns out that it’s just some kind of barn behind him that sticks out like it’s a wing.
It’s a pretty annoying mistake because I end up having to read this thing, and it’s a new adult thing from 2018. You all know what this means, right?
Yes, an odious sack of fecal material passed off as a hero that treats the women in his life like dirt.
“You gotta tell her that there’s nothing going on between the two of you, unless you want her again?”
“Oh, fuck no.” Dusty said shaking his head as he put his hat back on over his brown locks. “Mate, that one, she’s… yeah, just no.” he said, looking back over at the retreating redhead, who had put a little extra sway in her hips. Her cut-off jeans had barely any ass, and the two round cheeks were peeking out just below the hemline. Any shorter and they wouldn’t even qualify as shorts.
“She doesn’t even have a nice ass.” He said, Sam leaned to the side and looked.
“Mate, I know a few blokes who would take that.”
“They’re welcome to her, she’s a psycho bitch.” Dusty said. He moved out towards the large agricultural society’s shed when he heard the arrival of a car, its tires crunching on the gravel as the driver steered the car around to park it next to the others.
That’s Dusty Peterson, a rodeo. Our heroine Josie Wilson is the new animal doctor hired by the Australian Rodeo and Camp Draft Association to travel with the rodeo, so naturally she bumps into him.
It’s love, because he’s dismissive, rude, and patronizing to her, and it’s definitely a sign of good things to come when he treats her like she’s gum stuck at the sole of his boot. It’s too bad that he doesn’t shag some woman in front of her while flexing his arms and looking at his reflection, because I hear that’s a sign that he’s going to be utterly committed to the relationship.
Naturally, our heroine has to earn her stripes and prove herself worthy of receiving the hosing of fertile baby batter from such a paragon of manliness, so she has to get involved in an utterly undignified cat fight with the psycho bitch with no nice ass mentioned earlier.
She emerges triumphant, and I make a loud wailing noise of joy as I stuff my phone, on which I am reading this, between my thighs and imagine I’m the one riding that hot, hot bronco that is Douchey Peterlout.
Oh, and reading this story is also an amazing experience because the clear lack of editing tests my comprehension of English grammar and punctuation, and you know what they say about the need to keep my brain sharp at my age. The more I detect weird punctuation and the more I have to sort out what the author’s numerous running sentences are trying to tell me, the further away dementia will stay!
Seriously, though. Perhaps I can handwave Douchey Peterlout as a product of being the hero in a genre that celebrates misogyny and toxic male behavior, but the author should hire a proper editor, or let some AI program proofread this thing at the very least, to make it a presentable and serviceable product of that nature.
