Allie Bock, $2.99, ISBN 978-1370953004
Contemporary Romance, 2020
Allie Bock’s My Cowboy Crush is definitely bona fide cowboy romance when the hero is called Levi. This one may do the fashionable thing by having Levi and the heroine Katie give their points of view in alternating chapters, but the tropes remain the same.
Katie Kisment—let me check again; yes, it’s Kisment with an N—left town on what seem like distressing terms back then, because now that she’s back in Kisment Ranch, she acts like she is going to have a nervous breakdown every few seconds. She’s here to be a photographer for her sister’s wedding, but you know things are. She is thrown together with Levi, who will help her, and her anxiety shoots through the roof because he’s so hot and therefore she needs a shot of that ASAP, except she can’t because she just can’t, and oh my god, she can’t focus or breathe or…
Dang, just following this heroine’s train of thought makes me feel like I’m running a marathon without any prior preparation.
Levi, of course, is all smirks and swagger, and I can only wonder when smirking is supposed to be sexy instead of repulsively arrogant and slimy. At any rate, he has no issues with first or second base, but he can’t mess with the daughter of the boss, you know. Oh wait, of course he can, but that doesn’t stop him from bleating anyway that he just can’t.
Katie’s anxieties power this story like a Xanax-fueled locomotive, and for a while, I can only wonder whether she experienced some kind of traumatic incident that caused her to bail on this place ages ago. She is constantly flailing in her head, even mentioning that she is about to have a panic attack at one point, and when she opens her mouth, it’s more often than not to shriek, stammer, and protest like she’s living out some horrific memories in her head.
However, there are no horrifying traumas at all. As a result, Katie’s reaction here to everything—Levi, her family, etc—feels exaggerated to a grotesque degree solely to give this story some semblance of excuse to keep the story going as long as it is for an emotional conflict. Given that this is a clean romance, which means no sex, there is therefore no hanky-panky here to distract Katie from her constant mental self-flagellation.
In the end, I feel oddly used, due to the author having Katie behaving like a trauma survivor only for me to learn by the last page that Katie just need to sees a shrink for her inability to keep her emotions from going from 0 to 9,000 in the blink of an eye. If anything, this one isn’t a romance as much as it is a PSA to go check with a shrink about the use of mood stabilizers when one is anything like the heroine here.
