Sweet River Publishing, $3.99
Contemporary Romance, 2021

Okay, I’m not familiar with real estate laws in America, but is it normal for real estate agents to not let go of unreasonable property owners that don’t want to fix up the damages of their place but insist that the real estate agent sell the place anyway? 

Heroine Kimberly Walsh lets one client bully her and her “bestie” employee that they end up deciding to pay for the repairs out of their own pockets! Worse, they are going to hide the damage first so that the property can be sold off under false pretenses. 

I doubt the bully of a property owner is offering a grand commission for the sale, so is it really worth all this hassle and maybe even a potential loss of their real estate license to do this?

Meanwhile, hero Matt O’Connor makes his appearance in this story trying to pick up college students. He even brags about his success rate to me. Now that’s an excellent way to make a good impression, I suppose, if that impression is a pear-shaped rear end on my brain. 

Then, his father has a heart attack and oh no, poor Matt has to take over the reins of the family business and it’s so hard, people, so hard that he has to shoulder responsibilities like an adult man. So hard. So, he decides to distract himself by picking up even more women than ever.

Fortunately, he bumps into Kimberly, his bestie’s sister. She wants to go on a date with him, to know what’s like to be not boring, and I suppose just finding a sensible nice bloke on a hook-up app is out of the question. 

Now, normally a doormat and a whiny man-child will make a train wreck of a romance, and the result could either be a glorious kind of trash fire or an excruciating read. 

However, this one ends up being more in the middle of nowhere territory. The story never becomes gloriously awful or just too terrible for words. It just exists. 

I feel that this is because April Murdock can’t or doesn’t like to write about train wreck characters, as the main characters of Sweet Second Chances can’t stay in character for long. 

Soon, Matt morphs into a milquetoast nice guy devoid of any predatory pick-up artist vibes, instead he whines a lot about the pain of being a filthy rich kid that has to actually work for once. Likewise, Kimberly morphs into a rather nondescript lady that just goes along with the flow and reacts to Matt and other secondary characters without really making any significant moves to advance the plot on her own end.

Their romance feels uneventful, two-parts mundane conversations and antics, and one-part the playing of the saddest and tiniest violin in the world as the author tries to convince me that poor Matt is really having a hard life.

It gets even more bizarre when Matt starts waxing lyrical to me about what a strong woman Kimberly is, when Kimberly’s actions continue to mark her as the flattest doormat in town. It just tells me that the author doesn’t seem to get how her characters are coming off as.

Well, that or she imagines that just telling me how strong-willed the heroine will somehow manifest that into a reality. No, sorry, that’s not happening.

A part of me is glad that Matt and Kimberly never become worse than what they come off as in the beginning, but at the same time, they never truly become interesting characters. They just go through the same old boring motions, and the romance feels bland and forgettable because of this.

In the end, this one could have been an average, somewhat unremarkable, but still readable romance had the author not tried so hard to convince me that Kimberly and Matt are something other than what they appear to be in the story. The disconnect between what the characters are said to be and like and what they actually are is too great to overlook.

I can only wonder in the end whether the author was fully aware of what she was doing while writing this story, because all signs suggest otherwise.