Kimani, $6.25, ISBN 978-0-373-86216-0
Contemporary Romance, 2011
Our heroine Dr Mia Eaton decides to complete her residency by moving from Dallas to Jonesburg, Mingo County to assist a semiretired doctor in making house calls. There, she proves to our hero, Sheriff Kenyon Chandler, and everyone else that she is no spoiled damsel and captures the Sheriff’s heart. There, I’ve summarized this 200-plus story in two sentences.
Sweet Destiny follows what seems to be the typical Kimani formula nowadays – it is part of a series that has been running ever since God made the mountains, and the first few chapters of this book are pure filler and advertising material as our main characters interact with a revolving door of secondary characters, nearly all of them being of little relevance to the actual plot in this book. We see characters from previous books happily married and hoping that our main characters here will find the same bliss, unmarried characters running around telling me to watch out for their books… the same old boring routine, in other words. It is only in the middle of the book that any semblance of story begins to shape up, and even then, it’s a boring one. Mia has to prove herself to the hero and everyone else, and in the process, the story gives rise to unfortunate implications such as how women who use cosmetics to beautify themselves are somehow morally lacking. It’s so bad that we can’t all be morally upright and be born beautiful like the virtuous women in this book, sigh. Oh, and the heroine is attached to someone when she is macking lips with Kenyon, so the author chooses the easy way out by having the other guy turn out to be a jackass so that our heroine can continue to mack lips with Kenyon with conscience clear.
When the story takes so long to warm up, it has better be one darned good story. Unfortunately, the story in Sweet Destiny is a boring and hackneyed one featuring one-dimensional physically perfect characters just oozing with bland awesomeness. This one is like a halfway home of sorts between books in this author’s ongoing series – you have to be really enamored of the previous books to enjoy this one, because this one is more about fanservice and fluff than genuine substance.
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