Samhain Publishing, $5.50, ISBN 978-1-60504-461-3
Contemporary Romance, 2009

I really like the cover art of Let’s Dish. It’s classy and sexy all at once. But the story is a different matter altogether. If you are one of those readers who enjoy romantic comedies that focus around a heroine losing control of her life and the hero coming in to clean up her mess for her, this one is just up your alley. Me, I beat those heroines bloody using my trusty baseball bat in my alley, so I guess I’m probably not the right person to be reading this story. Even better, this story is narrated from the heroine Maggie Donnely’s point of view so there is no escaping her wretchedness.

Maggie runs Let’s Dish, a coffee shop that is naturally on the verge of going under. When the story opens, Maggie spots her ex-boyfriend Kevin Best in her shop so like every rational woman would do, she hyperventilates and acts like a complete cow in front of her customers. She was also recently divorced. Later, she will lose her store in a fire and she will lose all her backers. Teaming up with Kevin to win the top prize in a cooking contest is her only solution because heaven knows, we all know banks don’t hand out loans to people with severe intellectual handicap.

I have survived romances with heroines behaving like addled child-like fools are the frequent stars of the show, but I don’t remember having a violent allergy-like reaction to a heroine the way I do to Maggie. She’s everything that drives me nuts packed into a package labeled “Twit”. Not only is she incompetent, she is also always overreacting and being proud to a fault when it comes to seizing opportunities. Oh, and she is also ridiculously rude and bitchy not only to Kevin but also to everyone else in this story. It is hard to care for a story where the heroine is a total and utter moron, only to have her being rewarded for her painful antics in this story with supposedly true love.

Romances featuring very stupid women are a taste that I have never been able to acquire in my years of romance reading, so unfortunately for Let’s Dish, I’m tossing this one down the sink. What else is on the menu?