Dafina, $7.99, ISBN 978-1-4967-1604-0
Contemporary Romance, 2018
Poor Bryson Wells. Sure, he’s hot, wealthy, and drowning in whores, but his daddy was a terrible POS, so really, he’s the unluckiest man in the world. Oh, and his horrible whore girlfriends, forcing him to develop all kinds of trust issues when it comes to women! Why are there so many horrible whores in this world? Jordan Clark, our heroine, is happy that her daddy is finally marrying again… but that woman is also likely a greedy whore! I don’t know why people these days are complaining about toxic white men while Elle Wright clearly knows where the heart of evil lies: in the disgusting, scheming, vile, money-grubbing, forcing-men-to-be-male-sluts vaginas of all these whorey whores of whoredom.
Thank god we have the heroine and her female friends and family members who are the handful of non-whores in this world, waiting for the poor men to come around and sink their penises into these women so that these men can be redeemed back into the path of light, hallelujah.
So, aside from being a very important PSA reminding us that every woman hotter and thinner than us are total, absolute, hateful sluts, Pleasured by You is… er, not much else. Seriously, the entire trilogy is basically one long boring conversation interspersed with random Tourette Syndrome-like outbursts about those vile prostitutes stealing the men that we want but can’t have because these men think we are FAT and UGLY unlike those bitches that trick them with their hell honeypot and force them down the path of darkness – may Jesus smite these whores to death, especially that hot guy’s girlfriends because I really, really want him inside me. Amen.
Sorry, I’m trying to find something interesting to say about this one, but… let’s just say that I’m trying hard. Oh yes, Bryson and Jordan had been squirrel friends when they were kids, which is why he knows that he can trust her forever. Kids never change when they grow up! At any rate, these two have sex. The condom breaks because our hero is so big that it just juts out through the rubber like the Hulk or something. Fortunately, the author tells me that our hero normally will force his girlfriends to sit down and swallow a morning after pill because they are all untrustworthy slags hoping to make money by making him accountable for where he sticks it in, but he’d skip the routine this time because he knows that Jordan isn’t like those women. I don’t get why we even need scenes like this one – they add nothing to the plot and only makes me wonder whether the author expects the readers of this one to be wildly insecure and jealous women who need to imagine themselves as the heroine. Not just a heroine, mind you but apparently the only non-whore worthy woman in the world.
Anyway, Jordan is confident that she is not pregnant, and tells him so. She clearly is a failure when it comes to biology, because we all know that it is inevitable, even when the heroine wears a titanium diaphragm and makes the hero unload his baby goo into a toilet bowl in a house twenty blocks away from her. If the author needs the heroine to be pregnant for the plot, boom! She’s knocked up.
And that’s it for things that happen in this story. After that, it’s back to people talking a lot – explaining their feelings, dumping their life’s story on various people, chattering about banalities, and such. When they do find time to go all internal monologue-y on me, it’s to rehash the same details that have been spoken out loud over and over. Now, I don’t mind if these people are chattering incessantly in a fun way, but I get things like this instead:
“You can be sad for not having the relationship you wanted with your father, Bryson. You can be angry that he did the things he did to you. You can be hurt that you never got to tell him how you felt about him. And you can be relieved that you’ll never have to face him again, you’ll never have to deal with his overbearing, manipulative ways again.”
Right, because that’s how people talk on a spontaneous basis. Right.
Maybe I shouldn’t have used the word “talk” earlier, because lines like those I’ve dropped above aren’t the result of people talking. It’s the result of the author completely forgetting how real people talk and deciding that the character should be giving a speech from a podium instead.
Oh, and like most pregnant heroines determine to use their impending single motherhood as kind of criteria for future martyrdom, Jordan never seems to consider her child’s future well-being. It’s all about her. So, yes, they can’t be together because she can’t leave Wellspring and she knows that he can’t stay in town, and therefore, she wants to be the grown-up here and deprive her kid of a father, even if that man is loaded and can buy her entire family a nice big house somewhere else. In the end, though, it’s okay, because secondary characters spontaneously come up to them and explain how the other person has deep-seated issues and therefore, they should make allowances for that person’s antics. Really, everyone’s a shrink in this story to a surreal degree.
The scenes of Jordan having morning sickness, visiting the gynecologist, and such are the most genuine moments in this story, and therefore they are the most fun things to read. Everything else feels really artificial, and the author having secondary characters explaining away, talk show guest-style, the issues of the hero or the heroine to force those two to reconcile only makes the whole thing come off as even more scripted. Pleasured by You is a badly executed story too fake even for daytime soap, and I can’t say it’s been a pleasure.
