Laura Florand, $7.98, ISBN 978-1492110590
Contemporary Romance, 2013
Kai and Kurt are married, but they aren’t together anymore. Kai left him after her third miscarriage, due to a combination of guilt, hurt, heartbreak, and the need to give author Laura Florand a story that will be hailed as the next best thing ever back when this one first came out. In fact, I bought it because of the hype, in trade paperback format mind you, only to then forgot about it until recently, when my moving house efforts uncovered a scary number of books that I bought on impulse but never remembered to read.
Here they are again, when they are stuck in a cabin due to a snowstorm. So they abruptly have sex, Kai flail around shrieking internally about her angst and dropping F bombs now and then because she also has to be an edgy chick, they have sex some more, she flails some more and I get some flashbacks of her screaming and hurting, more sex, and then they are together again and… seriously. I suppose now psychiatry is a scam and we should all just shag our issues away?
That’s a nice thought, considering in real life the cost of therapy can be high and the use of antidepressants can lead to certain… issues… but I have to wonder why the hype for Snow-Kissed. Is it because the author was an online cool kid back when this one came out? I wonder because the treatment of the heroine’s issues is insultingly simplistic – it’s basically shag and shriek away the blues. Kurt is way too good to be believable, as a man in his position would have more likely moved on to someone else after the unbelievably crappy way Kai treated him. Sure, our heroine has her reasons to treat him like that, but her issues need to be handled by the author in a more believable, sensitive manner, in a far longer story.
You can argue that the author dishes up a lot of angst here, and I suppose then it’s a yay if that’s the name of the game, but what’s the point of all the angst if it ended up being just a convenient plot device for the author to pull at the readers’ heart strings without bothering to resolve the angst in even a halfway credible manner? As a novella, Snow-Kissed ends up presenting this eye-rolling drivel that a shag in a cabin is all you need to get over three heartbreaking miscarriages. Oh honey, please.
