Romantica, $4.99, ISBN 979-8201561635
Contemporary Romance, 2021

It’s probably worthwhile to summon Jane Austen via seance and inform her that her novels, especially Pride and Prejudice, have been completely stripped of their satirical elements in the eyes of readers that proceed to view them, without irony, as breathless romance novels and, worse, write terrible fanfiction that they later unleash onto an unsuspecting public.

Now, I don’t know whether Sally Mason intended Rent a Husband to come off so much as an alternate Jane Austen fanfiction, but the vibes are off the roof. Actually, reading it also makes me feel like jumping off that roof myself, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

This story is… well, it’s supposed to be a farcical comedy, but the author assumes that “farce” means letting her characters run around acting like imbeciles. Half the time I have no idea what is happening because every scene, with every character, is so over the top and absurd that the story tips straight into bad clown school project. 

The heroine is one Darcy Pringle, who spends the entire story weeping over her divorce to a self-absorbed jerk — which makes me appear very smart, naturally — when she’s not chasing after whichever guy that catches her fancy in a particular chapter. She has zero personality except weeping and pursuing the cutest guy that catches her eye in that moment, which explains why she could get so hung up over that pretty boy jerk that divorced her. Our heroine is as shallow as a pool that has a single digit depth just like her IQ.

Meanwhile, there are… three? Whatever, let’s just say that there are guys all over the town that are pining after her, although god knows why. So, the entire story is each man acting dumb and flailing around around Darcy.

Really, everyone and everything here is just over in a way that is too childish and too clown school to be taken seriously. 

Worse, the author introduces more and more characters as I turn the pages, and these characters just pop up and then act like I should have known them already all this while. These characters don’t have any personality, just like Darcy and her Dumb Dudes, so the story only becomes more chaotic and incoherent with each turn of the page.

Because the author spends so much time making sure that her characters behave in full throttle absurdity on every page, she has little time for anything else.

So, about the romance… wait, what romance? Darcy is a shallow twit that is led around by the men around her, as if she has zero ability to make up her mind on anything. 

Meanwhile, characterization is non-existent aside from maybe how these people are all unfunny clowns. 

The biggest sin committed by the author here, however, is making this story go on and on and on and on. My goodness, it’s like being stuck in a club with a horrific stand-up comedian that won’t stop, and the place has no windows or doors, so the only way out is to entirely close my Calibre or else I’d be screaming into the void.

So yes, I think I should look up how to conduct a seance and then see if I can have a nice chat with Ms Austen and the damage she had inadvertently caused with her books. Hey, if I accidentally summoned a demon instead, I’ll just send the demon along to haunt those authors that release books like this one into the market instead of doing the decent thing and keeping the whole thing stored away in some folder of shame.