Elizabeth Reyes, $3.99
Contemporary Romance, 2011
Before you laugh, yes, I think I have the entire The Moreno Brothers series in my pile of unread books. I bought them all when they were on sale, and I guess it’s like grabbing all the mystery fun boxes from some carnival sideshow only to learn later that I’ve brought home ten different strains of some STD pathogen.
Whether you can enjoy Sweet Sofie, the third entry in this series, hinges on whether it will trigger your happy or berserk buttons. I will have to delve into some spoilers here in order to elaborate on the button-triggering issues, so you know what to do if you want to read this thing unspoiled. Actually, why do you even want to read this thing? Go read something else!
Anyway, the story is simple. Sofie Moreno, the youngest Moreno girl, has loved Eric Diego ever since she was a fetus or something, and this story is structured more like a creepy stalker-asshole pairing drama than a romance novel. It follows the heroine as she grows from teen to twit, and throughout it all, she loves Eric… or does she love the bad boy Brandon instead? Oh, there is no suspense of a love triangle here, as it’s pretty obvious from the beginning that Sofie is destined to be Eric’s prize cow. Lots of stupid drama pepper the pages, from misunderstanding to communication breakdown to all the whores want my man nonsense to lots of bizarre justifications as to how everything a man may do wrong is due to a woman’s sinful beauty or slutty ways.
Indeed, while reading this one and thinking back on the previous two entries, I have to wonder whether this one is some kind of recruitment pamphlet for some cult where men and women alike agree that everything great is to a man’s credit while everything awful is a woman’s fault; hence, a woman must always be led and controlled by her men, never to look at another man unless she is permitted to do so by her men.
That’s one trigger button here: Sofie is so dominated and controlled by the men of her family as well as men like Eric that she actually has very little contact with any other male unless she is allowed to do so by these men. It gets to such a point that everything our heroine does and says is shaped by this arrangement. Basically, everything around her revolves around her brothers, Eric, Brandon, and some other men that the whole story starts to resemble some cattle pen fantasy where women are treated like livestock and loving it.
The second trigger button, possibly a more divisive one, is how Eric makes Sofie feel like turd because she “cheated” on him by kissing Brandon… but at the same time he’s hooking up with his back-up girl. His righteous indignation when it comes to Sofie’s “betrayal” is going to make some readers who don’t like double standards and hypocrisy to see super red, and there is a risk of stroke attached to the blatant implications that Eric is doing nothing wrong because a guy is going to do what a guy does, whee. Besides, that ho comes on to him hard, and she’s skanky, and basically, we’re back to the same old tedious “It’s always a woman’s fault!” nonsense that never makes any sense to me. Then again, that’s probably because I’m not so desperate for a man to shag me up that I will blame other women for his own failings and his resemblance to a steaming pile of turd. Come on, it’s present day now. Any guy who behaves like the men in this series comes off more like an insecure man-baby terrified of strong, independent women than anything else.
The story itself is already a tedious broken record of childish antics, immature bickering, and overwhelming misogyny passed off as some kind of alpha male romance fantasy. Add in some eye-rolling double standards and hypocrisy that have me wondering just whom the author thinks she is selling such swill to, and I get a story that best re-titled Sweet Lord, Kill Me Now.
Don’t read this. Even if you like cattle pen romances, there is some other story out there with such a fantasy that will surely be better than this digital detritus.
