Kimani, $7.99, ISBN 978-1-335-00587-8
Contemporary Romance, 2019
Aaliyah Bai is a boudoir photographer. She and some friends open a business called Buy All the Books in This Series, People, and Save Kimani… Oh, Wait, Nevermind. I know this because the first chapter wastes a lot of words telling me this, even if the heroine’s job and her friends had minimal to zero impact on the story, and they don’t even appear for the bulk of the story.
I also know of the heroine’s past and present, even though these details would be rehashed again later in the story, because, I don’t know. Maybe these authors had to attend an orientation once they were recruited to write for this line, and the editors warned them that any deviation from the structure and format set by these editors would result in the author’s pets being forcibly sold to restaurants in China.
Aaliyah is, of course, a workaholic that has to be lured into a vacation by her Aunt Sarah. I know this because these two explain these things in great detail, despite them being close family members and hence shouldn’t have to dump all this info in a robotic manner on me.
It turns out that Aunt Sarah has contrived with our hero Bryant Burrstone’s father so that all four of them can go on a road trip and the two old coots will do their best to make sure Bryant’s pee-pee finds its way into Aaliyah’s honey pot. Oh, it’s not creepy at all to have two old coots so fixated on the sex lives of their younger family members like this!
Our heroine knows this, but because she apparently cannot have a vacation all on her own, she agrees to come along. Hence, the rocky road to romance begins from that point…
This story has been written in that clunky, information dump-heavy, stilted manner that has me convinced that the editors had fired all real authors during the last few years of the Kimani line, and just pressed a button to launch the writelikeacrankAI.exe program on some dystopian computer to puke out the titles in that line. So many of those stories were written in the same robotic manner, I find it hard to believe that different people would actually turn out similarly clunky titles month after month.
That aside, Sherelle Green’s Road to Forever is a textbook example of a romance that is force fed to the reader. I’m told that the hero and the heroine is in love, by themselves via their own internal monologues and by other secondary characters remarking on how in love those two are. I’m told by the heroine that she likes the hero now and he’s no longer a jerk. I’m told by various secondary characters that insist to the heroine that he’s not a jerk. I’m told by the hero that he actually likes the heroine despite his actions all suggesting otherwise. On and on.
The presence of two obnoxious matchmakers already ensure that the main characters have very little opportunity to have their romance organically.
It is made worse by the fact that Bryant behaves like a ten year old brat. He eggs and mocks the heroine from the get go, and then smirks (yes, the author uses that word) to himself because, as he tells me, he enjoys “teasing” the heroine. He also reels the heroine in, and then remembers that his mommy and daddy didn’t have a textbook perfect romance so he isn’t supposed to let anyone get close to him, so he pushes her away again.
This guy is like a boy that can’t stop pulling the hair of, kicking, and bullying some girl that he likes in the playground, and he’s a grown-ass man. Am I supposed to find this behavior charming? Perhaps the author can send me some free happy white powder, and I may just be persuaded chemically to feel that way.
How do I know that Bryant has changed? Well, other secondary characters tell Aaliyah that he’s actually awesome, he is just a wee angst-ball despite all that money he has in his bank account, and our heroine agrees, telling me that she actually likes him. Do I see all this in action, though? Nope. The author feels that it’s enough to tell me all this, and her job is done.
This is one Road to Forever that leaks contrivance and artificially generated romance all the way to the end. Think of this one as plain old mediocrity created by committee.
