Kimani, $6.50, ISBN 978-0-373-86489-8
Contemporary Romance, 2017
Are two years considered too new-ish for a TBR Review Challenge? The theme is contemporary romance, and I’m clearing stock in my TBR pile where Pamela Yaye’s The Moretti Millionaires are concerned, so why not kill two birds with one stone, eh? Or, in this case, maybe the remaining two brain cells that I have left by this point because the bulk of the author’s books have not been good, to put it nicely. It’s not even as if these stories had deliciously nasty alpha males or anything like that – those, I can get their appeal, even if they aren’t normally my cup of tea – the stories are just badly plotted most of the time. Seduced by the Bachelor is another example of this. The entire plot can be summed up as basically: “The heroine keeps being stupid things for bizarre reasons, and how lucky that the hero loves her anyway, the end.”
Tatiyana Washington needs money for her family, but that doesn’t stop her from disrupting her likely inept, doomed-to-fail routine to make money so that she can sidle up to Markos Moretti under false pretenses. This can somehow lead to him introducing her to his friend whom her sister apparently had a one night stand with, so that she can somehow… make that man acknowledge the fact that he did a P&D on the sister? I mean… what? I fail to see how one can lead to another, but maybe the way Tatiyana interprets reality is vastly different from mine. She also claims that she knows that he is a monster before she even approaches him. What? If he’s such a beast, what makes her think he’d be putty in her arms?
Our heroine claims that her sister is depressed because she is now knocked up so… I don’t know, but I do know that in the end, this sister announces that she’s going to make the man take a paternity test. Why didn’t these people do this in the first place? If he refuses to answer her text messages, goodness. He’s a mayor! Just go tell the tabloids! Why all the nonsense… oh my god.
That’s the problem, people. I turn the pages, each time wondering in my loud, “Why? Why is that idiot doing all this? For two women that don’t even appreciate her efforts?” After a while I am actually wondering out loud, often punctuating my words with grunts of disgust and groans of pain. The entire pretense on the heroine’s part is simply pointless. It makes her look really stupid, and I probably shouldn’t say how this makes the author look for having wasted over 200 pages of words on stupid things, as that will be really rude. Worse, the heroine’s plot is exposed just pages before the happy ending is required to appear, and her reaction is basically, “Yeah I suck! So I don’t deserve you! Bye!” I’d love if she were fatally run down by a bus after pulling that stunt – five oogies! – but alas, that is not meant to be.
The hero Markos is actually pretty decent here, compared to the heroine, although the jury is still out on whether he’s a pushover or a gullible dingbat where a pretty face like Tatiyana is concerned. That woman is cray cray, and her sister and mother are cut from the same lunatic mold – what kind of sane man will want to be chained to such a thing?
The romance is a flop because 99% of it is built on Tatiyana’s lies, Tatiyana is increasingly obnoxious as a whiny dingbat who keeps doing stupid things while whining that she’s actually a good person, and even Markos gets on my nerves when he keeps telling me how smart the heroine is. Don’t lie, dude, I can see for myself what a brain tumor the heroine is.
This one is DOA from the get go, and I’m almost impressed that nobody else in Kimani paused to go, “Hey, does this even make sense?” when they received the story from the author. I guess this shows how much the people in that line cared. No wonder the line died giving birth to the current, weird Siamese twins incarnation of Kimani 2.0.
