Engrid Eaves, $0.99, ISBN 979-8990168244
Contemporary Romance, 2024
Engrid Eaves’s Love at First Blizzard is what we politely call “curvy girl romance”, so I am already giving the admittedly nice cover my side eye.
Also, I know that, as a romance reader, I am supposed to get all moist inside down there and everywhere at the idea of heroines being so helpless and weak before they are rescued by a hot and horny bloke, but come on, as a fatty reader, can I also ask for fatty heroines to have some brains? We’re already handicapped by osteoporosis, can we not add mental faculty failure as another item on that list of handicaps?
Oh well. In this one, June has driven her Mazda CX-5, indigo in color, off the road one super snowy day. I don’t know why the author needs me to know of the color and make of the car. Is that a nudge to blame the Japanese or something?
Her first instinct upon coming to is to preserve heat in the vehicle to keep her cello from being ruined. Hmm, I suppose she can try shoving it up her ass or something, as it will be warm enough in there, right?
Oh my goodness, the author really, really, really wants me to view the heroine as a walking no-brain.
Fortunately, these imbeciles can always count of a big strong man sulking in the bitter weather to come save them from their own efforts to off themselves.
Maksim—no, not the creep from Dancing with the Stars—and his cute dogs soon locate June, who begs him to go save her cello.
He obliges, and goes off into the sunset with that cello while the heroine dies alone in the cold, the end.
Oh wait, he drags that fat wretch along with her too. False alarm, people. The happy ending is a lie; the wretch is alive.
The rest of the story plays out like every other “Hot local saves a dumb city girl lost or dying in the wilderness, yay!” stories of this kind, only spiced up by the hero writhing inside with anguish about those things that he simply can’t tell June about himself and June moaning and wailing whether he will ever love her as hard as he boinks her.
Meanwhile, sequel baits pop in and out to remind me that there are more hot men and, presumably, more idiot city women rushing to this place to be rescued by these hot men.
It’s all very textbook, and as much as I dump on the premise, it’s not an isolated incident where romance stories with such a premise is concerned. Hence, I’m actually apathetic to the whole thing instead of being annoyed, as I’ve read similar stories with similar characters so many times by now that I am more or less inured to it.
The author’s narrative style is serviceable, however. I do wish she’d tone down her tendency to throw in so many unnecessary details in her story—I don’t need to know the nickname of some guy that pops up only once or twice in this story, for example, and I definitely don’t need to know the make and color of everything—but for the most part, the writing is on the readable side.
All things considered, I suppose three oogies, served with a noticeable lack of enthusiasm on my part, would be a fair score for this thing.
