Delancey Stewart, $4.99, ISBN 979-8201340117
Contemporary Romance, 2023

Delancey Stewart’s Only a Crush breaks new ground, somewhat, in the sense the heroine Annalee Tyson is the “ex-military” (ex-Navy, to be more specific) here instead of the hero Mateo. 

Of course, like most stories, the jobs of the hero and the heroine are merely decorative, as regardless of whether they are soldiers or butchers, the plot still takes a familiar path to the happy ending. Hence me putting inverted commas before and after the ex-military word earlier.

Annalee finds Mateo hot, hot, hot, but she also makes it a point to avoid entanglements with men that come with family, and Mateo is a widower with the usual precocious and cute daughter.

Meanwhile, he rises to the occasion whenever he’s near her, but as usual, he has no place in his heart for another woman, blah blah blah.

Because these two need a forceful push to bump groins ASAP, the author conspire to have them go investigate some outback cabin, whereupon a snowstorm then hits, forcing them to do the usual rubbing bodies thing like every story with every plot of this sort.

Just once, I’d like to read a story in which the hero and the heroine spend the entire time playing checkers or exchanging cheesy jokes, but I suppose it won’t be a romance story if the author didn’t faithfully follow the same formula done by countless romance authors out there.

The author has a nice vibrant narrative style, and the dialogues don’t feel stilted or contrived. Also, the daughter isn’t too annoying, and the secondary characters know their place and stay by the sidelines as much as possible.

All these are good things, and also the reasons why I manage to finish this story without feeling like I’ve aged at least twenty years by the time I read the last page.

This is because the story is so predictable to the point that it’s almost repulsive how I can second guess and predict correctly what will happen within the next few pages after the one I am reading at that moment. It’s like having eaten the same food over and over to the point that I really cannot take another bite without wanting to throw up and flee from the dining room, but at the same time, the author’s upbeat prose still manages to keep me seated and reading.

In the end, I guess this is a three-oogie read as I still find it readable enough to finish it.

Still, I’d caution that readers that already have had their fill of the whole stuck-in-a-cabin plot to tread cautiously, because the whole thing is way more cookie cutter than anything one can find in a Famous Amos factory. Indigestion could be an unpleasant side effect of reading this thing, so beware.