Xavier Neal, $2.99, ISBN 979-8201824860
Contemporary Romance, 2021
Xavier Neal warns me in the preface of Picnic Perfect that the main characters are going to break the fourth wall and talk to me directly.
Oh, are we talking about first person narration? The author is about five years late onto the bandwagon.
Luca Larson, my best friend, braces his back against the gray cloth couch, extends his tanned arm behind his wife and cockily beams. “Guess who’s gonna be an uncle again?”
I want to ask how is this possible but won’t because despite being almost thirty fucking five, he’ll still give me the answer you expect out of a twelve-year-old boy instead of a grown-ass man.
I shake my head in disbelief and grab my half-empty beer from the glass coffee table. “Tell me you know that Alexxa is a person and not a human gumball machine.”
Wait, if this is a first person narration, why are some paragraphs bold and italicized? I mean, this is first person narration. Everything is a fourth-wall breaker because this narrator is talking to me!
Talk about an unnecessary distraction. It’s as if the author wanted to deliberately troll my OCD or something.
Anyway, meet Warren McGuire. He’s a bit jealous that his best friends are all wedded and now popping up brats like there is a trillion dollar prize for the couple that beget the most brats in a year.
Maybe he does. Maybe I’ll admit to you and only you, I wish I had the same. Not necessarily with Alexxa. Don’t get me wrong. She’s a great fucking woman. Smart. Funny. Attractive – although a little less so once you’ve seen her spend twenty-three minutes trying to dig out a wedgie during an award-winning Mexican drama film. I used to think she might be perfect for me, hell, that we might be perfect for each other, but the truth is they are two halves of some fucked up whole. That they’ve always been the actual match versus what a clinical opinion might suggest. For a while, I thought it was Alexxa that I wanted, but at some point, when I finally took a minute and had a ‘sit on my own shrink couch’ moment, I realized I wanted what they had, not her. I wanted someone I couldn’t go the day without talking to. Someone I couldn’t sleep without. Someone who I knew was thinking about me just as much as I was her. Wouldn’t go so far as to say my soulmate but just…a fucking mate. Between you and me? I honestly figured it would’ve happened by now. I mean…I’m not fucking bad to look at – blond hair, blue eyes, not a muscle head but fit –, I’ve got a good job that makes great money – even if it is a little more demanding with higher class patients –, and my own place – not a house, but it’d be a waste to have that much space for just me. I have all the shit that makes me look good on dating apps – including a wide range of photos that present me as a fun guy and the one you want to have kids with – yet my success rate in the dating department is utterly embarrassing. Like, don’t fucking ask how bad or how long it’s been since I’ve had sex. I could easily be the posterchild for why you should stick to meeting people and getting blow jobs the old-fashioned way – you know, at bars or clubs or the grocery store parking lot.
Oh, I get it. The ridiculous bold and italicized wall of text is supposed to be… Warren flirting with me? Asking me to blow him in a parking lot? I don’t know what he thinks he is that I’d scrape my knees on the ground of a parking lot, because I’m not bending my knee for anything less than Elon Musk money.
Anyway, I wonder if the heroine Katy Horn is aware that her designated true love is asking the readers of this story to hook up in embarrassingly classless places and positions.
She and he meet at one of the weddings of other characters of previous entries in whatever this series is, and the rest are paragraphs of normal-looking text grossly violated by unnecessarily intrusive bold and italicized paragraphs that make zero sense to exist in the story at all.
Okay, the hideous bold and italicized paragraphs aside, this story has one glaring issue: for a story with alternating points of view narration, the people narrating a particular chapter all have the same over the top crackpot stand-up comedian style of thinking and talking. In other words, had this been a puppet show, the author is using the same voice and mannerism for all the puppets and it just feels amateurish as a result.
The humor is grating because it’s too over the top to be taken seriously. There is no break in the unpleasant Valley girl-Logan Paul screaming-“Look at me! LAUGH WITH ME!” mugging style that makes me feel exhausted after reading just a few paragraphs. Nobody in real life speaks like this; the whole thing is just too much and the author is trying way too hard.
For me, there’s no shame over the way my body is thicker in certain areas than others. I don’t hate having a slightly larger chest, which fills out certain shirts better, or slightly wider hips, which just so happen to make my favorite jeans look extra amazing on me. I’m totally in love with the few extra obvious pounds my figure possesses and proud of the toned portion in other parts. This is me, ya know? It’s a compilation of good choices and bad. Great times and sad. And people are either into it or not. And given the way Warren’s practically panting, I think it’s safe to assume he likes what he sees. A lot.
Uh, who is Katy talking to? I get it, many romance authors assume that romance readers are insecure beached whales that need constant validation that one day, if I buy the author’s stuff long and hard enough, I can manifest a hot guy between my thighs, but really now, who is Katy talking to? I suppose the author just wants to pander to all the fatties out there, but come on, this makes the heroine look like she’s trying super hard to convince herself that she’s a wonder instead of blubber.
Anyway, this one is unpleasant to read because it’s dialed up to painful levels of relentless try-hard fail-harder comedy, and it also looks horrible to my eyes. All in all, it’s more of an upturned picnic basket.
