Onyx, $6.99, ISBN 0-451-41113-7
Contemporary Romance, 2003
Katie MacAlister doesn’t write romance novels as much as she specializes in creating heroines that know how to push all my hot buttons until my brain cells explode one by one – pop, pop, pop. Reading this book gives me flashbacks of one of my most traumatic episodes in life: teaching a nursery class filled with rowdy, rude, and toilet untrained kiddies. The heroine Kathie Williams, like the heroines of the author’s last three books, is so stupid, so irrational, and worst of all, so obnoxiously immature and petulant that it makes me want to scream “Which part of ‘Die, imbecile, die, die, die!’ don’t you understand, bitch?” right before I take an AK-47 and blow that moron away to kingdom come.
Kathie Williams is an American export in England. She attends a mystery writers’ conference in Manchester, London, only to sleep with a Scotsman that comes complete with kilts and a sheep farm whom she declares eternal love forever and ever to, even as she realizes that the bodily fluids from their post-coital sweat-stained bodies have caused them to be stuck to each other. This is on page 65. Men in Kilts has 352 pages.
To fill the pages, the author has Kathie acting like a complete imbecile, from not having the common sense not to wear expensive impractical clothes to where there are many sheep waiting to manhandled to contradicting herself and babbling eternal love even as she pouts and throws irrational temper tantrums non-stop like a demented Energizer bunny determined to drive me insane (and all because Iain MacLaren, the hero, is ignoring her for something more important in his life – like his farm, like breathing, like reading the newspapers). Kathie demands that he pays attention to him 24/7 and goes positively nuts in a “You don’t love me anymore because you’d rather read the papers – I HATE YOU! MY LIFE SUCKS! Eek, eek, eek!” way.
And then because she finds that lil’ lambs are cute creatures, she insists that her sheep farmer boyfriend pull up all stops and change his lifestyle just to keep her happy. When he doesn’t, well, it’s tears and tantrums time again.
Did I mention that she is 37 and he is 47?
Maybe, sometime in the past, Kathie fell down the stupid tree and smashed her head against every branch on her way down. As a result, she spent the next thirty years of her life in a mental institution. That explains how this woman can grow to the grand old age of thirty-seven without being run down by a car the first time she tries to cross the road.
Forget the insanity that is a woman moving in with a man she barely knows. Forget the immigration issues that arise from an American woman apparently without problems overstaying in Great Britain with her new boyfriend. Let’s overlook the atrocious stupidity displayed by these two by having unprotected sex just because she assumes that he has his tubes tied. I mean, the protection is only against pregnancy, right? Try to overlook the fact that he has two sons that hate her (and rightfully so) and his neighbor is his over-the-top vile ex-lover that indulges in playground cat fight with Kathie. Let’s not even think any more about this book, because I am really trying my best to erase this book from my memory.
Is Katie MacAlister an acquired taste? I think so. It’s just not mine, I guess. If you’ll excuse me, right after I pick up my stomach from where it rolled under the couch after I retched one time too many, I think I have an emergency shock therapy to attend. After reading this truly horrific showcase of childish immaturity, bad stereotypings, and plotless tomfoolery, I think I can’t feel my legs anymore.
