Shiloh Walker, $2.99, ISBN 978-1495639210
Contemporary Romance, 2018
Well, F*ck Club: Shame finally sees Max “Shame” Schaeffer getting his groove on. He has issues to the wazoo, and heroine Charli Steele will also experience some traumatic turn of event later on, but for the most part, this story is about sex.
There isn’t much to the plot other than sex and stuff folks have come across many times before. Maybe that’s why this one feels shockingly lazy. The story opens with the hero grabbing the heroine away from some creep in a bar and then beat the crap out of him, and it’s right into same old, same old for anyone who’s read enough stories in which jealousy, possessiveness and sex are stand-ins for character development. She’s his BFFs’s sister, and she has always wanted him, but he has issues… but that doesn’t stop him from having sex with her right in the first chapter anyway.
Alpha male.
Groping the heroine.
Making her climax three thousand times with one stroke.
Like this.
Sexy, eh?
As I’ve mentioned, some heavy baggage shows up on the conveyor belt later once these two have gone through every decent positions and some kind of plot is needed to keep things going, but the treatment of such baggage feels perfunctory and superficial.
If F*ck Club: Shame had been better developed, I might care enough to wonder what exactly the author intended to do with this story. The baggage calls for more room in order to do them any justice, so why introduce them at all if the author treated the bulk of the book like a more steamy take of everybody’s favorite clichés? The characters aren’t well drawn, the romance feels like it’s just there to get the sexy thing rolling, but there isn’t enough sex to satisfy readers who are looking for erotica, just as there aren’t enough plot and romance to keep readers looking for those things happy. So what exactly is this thing supposed to be?
That is, if I care enough to wonder. This one is well written enough, and the heroine isn’t daft, which is always nice. For the whole part though, I am more indifferent than anything else when it comes to this story.
