Kimani, $6.50, ISBN 978-1-335-21664-9
Contemporary Romance, 2018
Garrek Taylor is in town and he’s hot. He’s a basketball player… no, a football player… no, that’s not it, let me check again. Ah yes, a navy pilot. That’s new, at least. He is in town, temporarily grounded due to an unwise fling with the usual ho-bag type that comes with some repercussions. Lucky for him, his family is loaded to the gills, and he comes back to Temptation to loll around in the family antebellum mansion. And then he’s paired up with Harper Presley in an auction thingy – wait, I thought the auction thing went out of style along with sex clubs owned by grannies and other tired old tropes five years or so ago – and it’s blah blah blah time.
Really, One Unforgettable Kiss is more like one interminable yarn. The author spends pages after pages delving into each main character’s back story, often repeating the same old details a few times, but at the same time, she neglects fleshing out the interaction between Garrek and Harper. As a result, these two characters exist more as two distinct individuals whose crotches happen to bump into one another now and then. As a romantic couple, there is zero chemistry. Harper clams up and behaves like a sullen crab in his company, even as he for some reason feels the heat between them when they touch or something like that. And suddenly, they have sex, and suddenly they are acting like they are in a relationship. How on earth did they get from that point to this? I have no idea.
The story is more about conversations and internal monologues. Harper and Garrek keep going through the same things over and over in their heads. When they are not gazing deeply into their navels, they are having conversations with various characters that do little to move the story. Maybe it’s unfair, but the impression I get from reading this one is that the author had no clue what to do with the story line, which was probably given to her by her editor, so she just blah-blah-blah her way while hoping that inspiration would strike or, failing that, she met the word count first. It’s no fun wading through the monologues and streams of consciousness either, because they all boil down to the same old thing: trust issues, mommy issues, and other done to death elements that just have to show up in every freaking Kimani book these days.
Anyway, this book is done, and I’m still wondering when that One Unforgettable Kiss is ever going to happen.
