Kimani, $6.50, ISBN 978-0-373-86477-5
Contemporary Romance, 2016
Morgan Hill is a schoolteacher who loves children – even if she mocks them in her head and generally acts like a sour prune in front of her students. But we’ll have to play along with the author when she says that Morgan is awesome with kids, or else we’d still be gaping at this book come February. Anyway, the community center, which is the school’s usual venue for their holiday play, has been sold off, so this play will be the last one ever held here. So Morgan is also sour because she’s confident that this building, which is dear to her, will be torn down to make way for supermarkets and other horrible things that will surely destroy the town.
So, when the new owner Grayson Taylor shows up, she is all surly and snarly at him. Thus, for the first third or so of One Mistletoe Wish, this story follows the same pattern. He asks something nice, does something to help out; she responds by being all rude and snappy before flouncing away; he admires her rear end and thinks that he really needs to tap that soon. Repeat this until a right amount of words has been accumulated to make up the word count.
And then we go to Grayson’s angst. His parents are the black Jon and Kate – he and his five twin siblings were subject of a reality TV show that eventually ended when his father abandoned his family to enjoy the high life. Thus, Grayson blames all media for being so vile and disgusting as to… I don’t know. Maybe the media single-handedly grab the father’s pee-pee and forces it into other women’s hoo-hoo? At any rate, Grayson will never have anything to do with the media. NEVER! He’ll just let his PR agency do the communication with those people. What, you think I’m joking? Our hero is really sincere in his hatred and boycott of the media, can’t you tell?
So, Grayson. He’s the saddest person in the world. When Morgan tells him about how her husband and true love died, leaving her to care for twins, he’s like, oh, just like his mother, how sad. Yes, because a crappy spouse walking away is the same as losing a beloved husband – it’s practically the same thing! As you can probably tell, Grayson is all about deluding himself into thinking that the world revolves around him.
Still, he finally gets to lay it on Morgan and she finally becomes all sweet and nice because she’s now getting it regular, and there is still some distance to go before the happy ending. Oh dear, what is an author to do? Bring in the shrill, jealous, skanky woman that Grayson used to boink, that’s what! And it’s totally fine that Grayson uses and ditches women without much thought, because those women are all whores, unlike pure Morgan, and hence, we romance readers who hate beautiful women salute Grayson for finally ditching those WHORES and realizing that WE ARE THE TRUE PURE WOMEN THAT EVERY HOT GUY IN THE UNIVERSE MUST MARRY AND BREED KIDS ON FOREVER AND EVER AND EVER AND EVER AMEN. And then we’ll go out and drag a skinny beautiful ho to our basement for us to skin and dismember, before cleaning up to watch reruns of Empire while finishing off another two tubs of Ben and Jerry.
