Emberlust Press, $3.99, ISBN 978-1301390236
Contemporary Romance, 2013

Hello there, glistening shiny man on the cover. The world can be a dark, dark place, and we can always use more light at the end of the tunnel, so why don’t you come closer and let me rub more baby oil on your beautiful body? Let light reflect more strongly from those Photoshop’ed abs, and let those headlights lead us all from the heart of darkness to the edge of glory.

Oh right, Carey Decevito’s Once Written, Twice Shy. Okay, when this story opens, our hero, Paxton, is confronted by his wife of five years, Julie, who wants out. Oh don’t worry, he’s not like really in love with her, readers, plus she’s the one that cheated on him, so everyone knows now that we can’t blame the hero for anything that is wrong with his marriage.

Oh, and Paxton Lowell has a kid. Naturally, that’s where the heroine Alissa comes in. Every heroine in a romance novel has no problems mothering a kid thrust onto them because they are all, deep inside, trapped mothers waiting to emerge from their perfect, sexy bodies,

Stunned by his soon-to-be-ex-wife’s airport accepting other airplanes onto her landing strip, Paxton is galvanized to write and post his article on Crappad Wattpad an online free-for-all story site, and that’s how he gets a fan in our heroine. He seeks out her profile and sees a hot chick—fortunately, as we can’t have uggos trying to fondle our hot hero’s sensitive pen—and is like, ooh, hot, because we all know everyone posts a real photo as their profile pic. She is also talented, although I’m not sure he comes to that opinion because her profile pic is hot or her wordsmith genuinely makes the ink in his pen flow harder. She can write sexy, suspense, hot, romance, and everything all in a single page because Carey Decevito Alissa McSecretlysexy is the bomb, the jam, hot dot com dot org dot net all at once.

So they meet up, and before I can blink, they are going at it like the end of the world is tomorrow and they want to go out with the biggest bang ever.

Okay, let me just go straight to the point: the romance. The author doesn’t develop the romance organically here, and that’s my biggest issue with this otherwise pretty readable story. Instead of having Paxton and Alissa meet and get to know one another in a realistic manner, the author instead practically mashes these characters’ lips and groins together as soon as possible. The author then throws in contrived events such as the kid needing a marrow transplant (leukemia, every fictitious character’s favorite cancer) and oh goodness me, you will never guess the person that turns out to be the perfect donor. Instead of showing me why the two characters are made for one another, the author has that creepy kid insisting that Paxton must marry Alissa so that Alissa can be that creepy kid’s new mommy.

Making things worse is that this story is told from Paxton’s point of view exclusively, and I soon begin to notice things that make me feel tad uneasy. I know, Julie cheated on Paxton, but she is still Jasper’s mother, so I find it bizarre that the author has Paxton resenting Julie’s efforts to input her own opinions into that brat’s care, and seems to expect me to support Paxton in this. More bizarre is how the decision Paxton disagrees hard with turns out to be actually beneficial to that brat in the long run, and still, I don’t see Paxton ever conceding that maybe his kid’s mom has a point.

Then there’s Alissa. She never disagrees with him. She does everything he wants or anticipates her to, and she puts out every time he gets horny, complete with compliments on how his sexual prowess makes her see every color in existence exploding on her retinas and then some. So, the cheating aside, Julie is painted as the not-so-nice woman because she has opinions and ideas that may not be the same ones that Paxton has, while Alissa is painted as the perfect bang-maid for Paxton because she never disagrees with him or goes against his wishes.

Since this story is from his point of view, I think you can see why I am not too comfortable with this. Our hero wants a bang-maid that uncomplainingly cares for his kid, puts out to him whenever he wants some, and constantly flatters his ego, and all he needs to give back in this relationship is his big, big, big dong that our heroine can’t get enough of.

Also, and I’m being nitpick-y here, I don’t buy Paxton as a writer. Despite claiming that he loves to write, he doesn’t think like a writer. He doesn’t seem to get any inspiration from the world around him or feel an urge to write things down. Sure, one can argue that it may be hard to focus on writing whatever it is he writes about when the brat is doing his best to be sick so that he’d be in the hospital, thus giving daddy and new mommy lots of time and space to bang in every room of the house without having to actually care for him, but still, I’d imagine a man with a writer’s soul will occasionally want to sit down and write… something, anything. Here, Paxton just wants to bang bang bang. He could have been anything from a butcher to a cop; him being a writer feels like a quickly-forgotten plot device to get the story going.

Anyway, the narrative is clean and the only cringe parts are from that monster brat trying to force his father to marry Alissa and acting cute. I didn’t sign up for what seems like a fantasy of a dude tired of women constantly not falling over to worship him, however, so I’m giving Once Written, Twice Shy a hard pass despite the story being actually very readable. My baby oil is for the dude on the cover; Paxton, however, will have to do without.