Liz Crowe, $2.99, ISBN 978-1310150319
Contemporary Romance, 2014
Love Garage is an epic fail as a romance. There, I’ve said it. But as a trashy sexual musical-chair soap opera, it is glorious.
This is of course part of a series revolving around the ultra-slutty Love guys and their equally horny getting-it-on-baby hangers-on. In this one, we have Aiden Love, who has a thing for older women ever since his older brother’s ex-girlfriend seduced him when he was a teenager. He then got on with a professor while in college, and now that he’s back in town to be with his dying mother, he wastes little time hopping between the old high school girlfriend and her best friend, sometimes having a party with the both of them.
His older brother Antony – the biggest slut of them all, of course – is getting it on with Rosalee, the widow of his best friend and… well, everything else is a spoiler. Aiden has a thing for Rosalee, though, since she’s also a hot older woman. Oh no.
Actually, I don’t know why it’s an issue here that Aiden wants Rosalee, since everyone is already sleeping with everyone else. Why not just turn the weekends into one long orgy ball? Everyone seems to have copious stamina and an ability to orgasm at least twenty times a day, so there’s plenty of love to go around. Oh, that’s right, the Love brothers may poach onto one another’s girlfriends, but officially they don’t share because they’re those so-called modern romance heroes that like to slam their fists into walls and do other macho stuff.
Anyway, as a romance, this one is a major flop because the author spends way too much time having her characters play sexy musical chairs. It is only late in the story when she tries to fool me into believing that this is some kind of love story. Oh please, I’ve been reading these threesome scenes, angry sex scenes, horny shag scenes, and more – in fact, Rosalie and Aiden spend more time here sleeping with other people than with one another. What, they’re in love? That’s funny, tell me another one.
Still, I enjoy the trashiness of the whole thing. It’s also nice that the women here are allowed to shake their rumps at men that catch their fancy without being subjected to the typical double standards of the genre. If I have my way, Aiden would have settled into a polyamorous relationship with his two lovebirds and Rosalee with Antony – this will make more sense given how much time the author has spent on these pairings. The whole “Aiden and Rosalee” thing feels more like some most unconvincing “Gotcha!” kind of bait-and-switch, like the author is just out to subvert expectations or something.
At any rate, Love Garage feels oddly misguided, as it would have been far better had it been given the erotica treatment instead of being forced at its late stages to conform into the romance novel formula. Still, all that bed-hopping, dysfunctional family soap opera, and melodramatic male histrionics all come together to give me some good old-school trashy realness, and I can’t lie and pretend that I didn’t have a lot of fun following these nincompoops’ shenanigans.
