Renee Dahlia, $0.99, ISBN 979-8201043995
Contemporary Romance, 2022
At its core, Renee Dahlia’s Show Time is about Ben Seapine, the tech guy working in Seraph’s Burlesque Club, having a crush on one of the dancers, Dan Browne, only to think every birthday in the next 20 years has come in one go when Dan invites him to be his fake date in Greece. Guess what happens during the trip and back.
Sure, it’s not an original premise, but it’s not necessarily a bad one…
Until I think for a half a second as to why Dan the hot man will need to slum this low to get a date.
Dan couldn’t believe that smoking hot Ben had agreed to his, quite frankly, wild and impulsive plan. When the invitation had arrived from Titus, he’d been so thrilled for one of his closest friends. Vittorio was a lovely man and Titus deserved to be happy. It’d only been in the middle of the night that his brain had woken him up with the super-anxious thought that now he was the ONLY one in their friend group who was single. They already roasted him for his side hustle; what type of electrical engineer did Burlesque? And using that bass player from Queen as a comeback had gotten old pretty fast, especially once the movie came out and they all quoted lines from it at him. Even though Krishna had never said it aloud, Dan still heard the subtle judgement in his tone. Apparently being a sex worker years ago meant he didn’t deserve to find happiness. Well, fuck that. Dan had a date for the wedding now and Krishna could shove his little backhanders up his arse. He breathed out, long and slow. It wasn’t that simple. Krishna had been his friend for a long time now, and most likely these feelings were just Dan’s own anxiety and nothing to do with one incredibly awkward night twelve years ago.
What the…
This is the first time in this thing that I am reading about Titus, Vittorio, and Krishna. These characters probably show up in previous installments of the series, who knows as I have not read them, but really, is this rushed one-paragraph exposition diarrhea the most effective way that the author can think of to explain Dan’s motives to me?
The execution of the story is messy. There is something off about the whole thing—I feel like I’m always trying to catch up with the author and she’s not giving me enough to work on in order to do that.
Dan wore a tight white t-shirt that pulled tight across his broad shoulders, strong pecs, and was taut enough around his stomach that Ben could almost see Dan’s perfectly groomed chest hair and that dark line of black hair that went from his breastbone down his stomach and disappeared into his jeans. No one had any right to be this beautiful; and just to top it off, Dan had black hair paired with pale white skin punctuated by freckles that danced across his nose, and brown eyes with a hint of amber and green in them.
The above is one example. All that description and I still can’t see why “no one had any right to be this beautiful”. So that guy has broad shoulders and strong pecs with perfectly groomed body hair—wait, do these dancers get to keep their body hair?—but what is so amazing about that? Flat stomach and broad shoulders are the bare minimums to qualify as romance heroes, so I need more description to fully buy the idea that Dan is the hottest hottie that ever hot’ed.
Ben didn’t understand Dan. Not just the extroverted way he loved talking to everyone. It was the inconsistency he didn’t understand; the sway between cocky and needy. Dan seemed to really need people to like him, and Ben just couldn’t figure it out. Why? Most people weren’t worth it. Worst of all, Ben was curious about Dan. He wanted to know what made him tick and he kept forgetting that this was fake. Dan had jokingly offered him a kiss. What if it wasn’t a joke? Ben definitely wanted more kisses with Dan. They walked together at the back of the crowd as everyone walked along a narrow road that wound down the side of the hill. The view was fantastic, looking out over the water. If he had his camera, he’d shoot the scene so the crowd was a little blurred to give it action, and the landscape would be sharp. As they neared the restaurant where the wedding lunch would be held, the crowd seemed to grow, as if everyone in the village joined in. There were more cars, more people, more noise, and he instinctively slowed his pace to linger behind everyone.
There are way too many different things crammed into the single paragraph above. This only makes Ben come off like someone that can’t focus on a single train of thought for longer than a few seconds.
On top of the substandard writing, there are many other things that scream amateur hour here, such as Ben solving Dan’s lifelong crisis with just a conversation. This story feels more at home at some personal writing showcase website, as it is nowhere polished enough to be a finished product that is for sale.
