Elizabeth Reyes, $3.99
Contemporary Romance, 2011

I don’t think Elizabeth Reyes is an awful writer. In fact, her narrative has a nice, uptempo tempo – the pacing is fine for the most part. Unfortunately, the characters never talk like real people, instead committing eye-rolling sins such as launching into rehearsed-sounding monologues at the drop of a hat, going on and on to someone else about things that the other person should already know, and making drippy love sentiments that are often contradicted by their not-so-loving actions. The last, especially, tend to happen with the hero of Romero, called – duh – Ramon Romero.

Romero hangs out with Eric Diego and Angel Sanchez, and I don’t know whether these are a trio of porn actors in the making or the author had looked up the most stereotypical names one can think of for these folks and said, “I’ll take them all!”

The heroine is Isabel Montenegro, and I guess at least that’s not a porn actress name. Right? Don’t tell me if I’m wrong, I don’t want to know. She’s of course a school teacher because that’s the most feminine occupation anyone can give a romance heroine without people mistaking her for a prostitute. It’s very important for the author’s heroines to be pure and all, otherwise the heroes would hit them, and that would be these women’s fault and we can’t have that.

I’m getting ahead of myself, though. The first half of this story has a more typical young adult-type format, with years passing between chapters, as Diego and Isabel grow up with him necking and macking various women while acting full up of manly-angst at not being school smart, while she does her good girl thing without having any filthy men in her life. Remember, it’s very important for this author’s heroines to be pure and virtuous, or else they may cause their men to lose it and beat them, and that will make those men look like monsters in readers’ eyes and that would be a terrible thing indeed.

This part is actually the best part of the whole story because the only things I have to deal with are stilted conversations and eye-rolling gender stereotypes. When Diego and Isabel really get into the groove, that’s what things roll downhill faster than an elephant tripping down a mountain slope. There is this really stupid subplot involving Isabel’s sister that is way too over the top for me to even want to get into, but that’s not the worst of it.

Diego transforms immediately from a man who sleeps with any woman that moves into a domineering control freak that stalks and spies on Isabel so that he can be sure that no man will ever talk to or touch her ever again. He loses his temper each time a man is close to her, maybe because he secretly thinks she is a skank who gives it up to anyone at the drop of a hat. He gets rough with these men and while he declares he will never hit a woman, he has no issues hitting the wall or anything else in front of our heroine when he’s mad at her.

Here’s the thing – he doesn’t have to change or grow up, because the author portrays him as perfect already. I wish I am kidding, but everyone makes excuses for Romero here. He’s just sad because he was never given enough hugs, people never say nice things to him, blah blah blah, and somehow, everything terrible about him is someone else’s fault.

It’s not like our heroine can stand up to this man. She even picks what to wear in order to please him, so don’t expect much from this dingbat. I have to give the author one thing: she has the heroine down right. Only a heroine with self-esteem issues and sub-optimal brainpower like Isabel would think the world of a man like Romero, and feel that she is unworthy of his affections.

Worse, given that our hero already fancies her the biggest whore of Babylon for getting men to even glance at her for one second, naturally she has to sneak around him and do stupid things, like meeting the villain alone, so that she gets into trouble and fail the hero’s purity test all in one go.

In other words, Romero is a story with a plot – or what passes for it – that hinges heavily on the heroine being a colossal idiot every time she’s not pinned under the hero, and in the process inviting all kinds of ire from the man.

Sigh.

I know there is a market for this kind of fantasy, and I do love me some bad boy myself. Romero, however, comes off too much like someone who will one day beat up his women, and the author enables her hero’s character way too much by making excuses for him or, worse, blaming his failings on other characters. The whole thing is too much of a trashy low-tier soap opera for me, so I’m afraid I am really going to have to kick Romero and his idiot girlfriend to the curb.