Frankie Love, $2.99
Romantic Suspense, 2021

Is it just me or reading the official synopsis of a romance title these days can be hazardous to the brain cells? Take this “I’m making dumb koochie-koochie sounds to my very stupid baby” one from Heart of the Mountain:

Dear Reader,

Were you missing the mountains as much as we were?!

James is the virgin burly bearded baby daddy you’ve been waiting for.

Can you say that three times fast?

I think I lose at least 30 points of IQ just from reading the four lines above. Wait, there’s more.

Try it.

A little louder now. Harder. Harder.

Yes. Yes.

Wait for it.

Ohhh, yessss.

Just.Like.That.

He likes it when you scream his name.

We like it when you come back for more.

Xo, Frankie & Chantel

I’m doing the “Xo” myself, only, it’s more like “+o” because I am holding that “X” like a holy cross against whatever else the authors have in store for me. There is actually a “:)” in there that I have to take out because it doesn’t display properly on the page, mind you, so I open this thing fearing that the story had been written like the authors were texting one another the morning after a drunken binge.

So why do I buy this thing, you ask? Yeah, well, let’s just say I’m curious about a lonely mountain man that hasn’t taken to shagging the wildlife in his part of the woods.

That fellow is James. He reads, so we know he’s not dumb, and he keeps a dog, so we all know he is kind and empathetic. He owns firearms, so he’s also a staunch supporter of the Second Amendment, and I hope the authors won’t receive angry emails from triggered people that read the synopsis on Goodreads or on their Twitter wall, swearing that they will boycott and cancel the authors forever.

He can hunt for food should his supplies run out, so we know he’s not a cannibal and he’s handy to have around during a zombie apocalypse. He’s also hot, so he’s not an inbred hillbilly from Wrong Turn or The Hills Have Eyes.

Our heroine couldn’t find a better person to do that swoon and faint thing near his home. Marcie also has a baby with her, so yay, today is her lucky day and she has found herself a free daddy for the baby. Also, James is well off, the place has modern plumbing, and he even feeds the baby while Marcie does her sleeping and recuperating sexily—but never slutty—thing on his bed.

Mountain man? More like mount that man, baby, because that fellow is way too good a catch to let back into the pond.

The “romantic suspense” part comes from Marcie’s part catching up with her and the baby. but by that point, James has been built up to be this mountain man superhero in all but name, so I won’t be surprised if he had just unzipped his jeans and used his salami to slap the rightness into the world again.

So yes, that’s Heart of the Mountain. It’s not a romance story in the sense that there is never any proper characterization or plot build-up. It’s very clearly a thing designed to sell this fantasy of shacking up with a mountain man that doesn’t smell or lack high education, in a house that has all the modern amenities one can think of. I can only wonder whether it’s really a mountain man fantasy when the fantasy in question is so inauthentic.

From a technical point of view, the prose is thankfully far more better constructed than the official synopsis, and the whole thing is readable. The only issue I have, from this technical standpoint, is that both Marcie and James have the same tone and voice when it comes to their first person narration—even in his own head, James doesn’t even think like a mountain man, sheesh; he’s basically the average well-off urban hero with wallpaper mountain man cosmetics.

From an entertainment perspective, however, meh. I’m kind of hoping for mountain man goodness, like wild animal sex on the dining table, encountering snakes in the outhouse, decapitating a deer for dinner, and erotic diarrhea after drinking contaminated water. Oh well, at least the guy on the cover looks like he’s worked hard to groom himself like a halfway believable mountain man.