Kimani, $6.50, ISBN 978-0-373-86455-3
Contemporary Romance, 2016
I don’t know what to make of Zuri Day’s Sapphire Attraction. At first, at the surface, it’s basically a clash of wills between our hero, Ike Drake Jr, and our heroine Quinn Taylor. Quinn is the immature, flashy lady who causes a fuss wherever she goes, and Ike thinks of her as an immature troublemaker even as he pops a big one in his pants just from the sight of her. The more he lusts after her, the harsher is his opinion of her, so yes, he’s that kind of hypocritical dweeb. Meanwhile, she crashes her car into his Ferrari, and while she claims that she did that because she wanted to avoid hitting a dog, he takes her to court. She’s like, “How dare you sue me for hitting your car?” (Seriously, those are her exact words.) And so forth.
These two are very wealthy and pampered brats, so it’s hard to view them as anything but immature dingbats doing their best impersonation of two bratty kids in the playground. And then, these two suddenly morph into decent and even likable people, and I’m not sure how that happened. And even more abruptly, Quinn discovers the existence of some global financial scumbaggery very late in the story, and this thing is now some kind of thriller, and the whole thing then abruptly ends because the word count has been met and the happy ending is coming to shoo everyone out of the exit.
Huh? Did the author get bored of her immature lead characters – which I don’t blame her for, honestly, as they get really tiresome after a while – and decides to just slap in some third-rate John Grisham thing before calling it a day?
Everything feels underdeveloped and half-baked here, and I feel like I’ve somehow been duped.
