Tulabella Ruby Press, $2.99, ISBN 978-1370148554
Contemporary Romance, 2014
Brandon Stephenson, the white guy on the cover of Kendall Morgan’s Keeping Score, has a “web TV show” on YouTube called Brandon’s Swag Bag, in which he does gossips and other vapid stuff. He’d lost a lot of weight, his manboobs are now pecs, and he’s now at Pacific Palms Resort hoping to party with the hot boys.
A vapid celebrity gossip hound that has lost a lot of weight? Is that Perez Hilton under a new name?
At any rate, he soon has his eyes on Julian Bailey, and as he works his way through a series of flings and one-time-shags, he stymied by the fact that another guy also has his eyes on Julian.
“The hurdle is that Great Barrier Reef called Jay Kwon. I saw you met him, too,” Tony said. “And the wager will be won by anyone who can get Julian to suck his cock. It’s five dollars to get in. Winner gets the pot, and of course a blow job from Julian. But, if Jay can’t get it done and he’s blocking everyone else, I doubt we’ll have a winner this week.”
“Yeah, what’s with him?” Brandon asked. “He acts like he owns Julian, which would be pathetic if it weren’t kind of racist.”
Betting on being the first person to suck the black dude’s BBC, however, is not racist at all.
“No, that he’s such a stalker creep. He’s rich. His father makes millions off the backs of Chinese and Indonesian indentured servants at his factories that spit out all the crap we buy from our Big Box shopping centers. I could do so much with that kind of money,” Mike said.
Talking like this about some Indonesian Chinese that one hardly knows is also not racist at all.
I have to love it when an author brings up racism in situations that don’t seem to be that, but seems completely oblivious to the possible racism perpetuated by the “good guys”.
The kindest word I can use to describe this story is “shallow”. Brandon spends more time shagging random blokes than actually forming a believable relationship with Julian. Yet, I’m supposed to believe that these two have some kind of thing. Really?
The story would have been better off being some work of pure erotica, featuring a former fatty that catches up on lost time by shagging anything that moves. At least then the whole thing will fill more honest in its embrace of the vapid promiscuity and meaningless flings. By trying to pass itself off as a romance, however, the story ends up being an eye-rolling insult on my sensibilities. Seriously, who is the author trying to kid?
This one does have the best closing line of a chapter though.
“Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Oh yeah…woooooooohooooo!” Julian’s white spunk started shooting upward landing on the bedspread and the floor. He breathed heavily, and then they both drifted off to sleep.
Top that, Jane Austen!
