Kimani, $6.50, ISBN 978-0-373-86481-2
Contemporary Romance, 2016
Taming Her Tycoon, like too many Kimani books these days, is another story which is basically a string of oh-so-familiar clichés lazily put together to give readers more of that same old feeling. How predictable is this one? Let’s put it this way: even the structure of the story is familiar. It starts off introducing the heroine Naomi Brooks and her BFF, telling one another things they should have already known to fill readers in, and then this is followed with the hero Lucius Knight and his BFF doing the same. Just like how practically every other book in this line starts out as these days, sigh. It is as if this book is written from some kind of template.
Anyway, Lucius Knight is another super-duper loaded up to his sexy neck businessman whose nature of business is suitably vague here, suggesting that the author either can’t be bothered to do research to make his businessman thing believable or she thinks readers don’t care as long as the hero’s big fat pee-pee comes with big bags of cash. To be fair, it’s hard to argue against that last one. Naomi Brooks co-owns Brooks and Johnson, which sell organic products and toiletries, but she’s nowhere as loaded as the hero, as it is only romantic when love is between a loaded dude and cash-strapped lady. Naomi’s partner wants to devote herself to being a full-time mother of two, but despite the success of her company, Naomi can’t afford to buy up her business partner’s shares. What is worrying is that Lucius Knight’s company has been buying up shares in the company slowly, and with the extra shares up for grabs, Lucius can easily take over and gobble up the company.
Oh, and like every other Kimani heroines, she has had always had a crush on Lucius. Really, people, who have time to work on developing a believable romance when the author needs the precious space to tell me the daily mundane routines of the hero and the heroine as well as conversations with various secondary characters that do not do much to drive the story forward? There’s a template, and we can’t deviate from that, or sales will crash and then you will have authors begging you on Twitter and Facebook to donate to their Patreon accounts.
So, the story. Instead of cashing in by selling to Lucius and using the money to start another company like most entrepreneurs do, Naomi buckles down. Her employees! Her passion! Her company! It’s all about the feels when it comes to romance heroines, after all, and Naomi knows that Lucius will only carve up the company or run it into the ground. Considering that she lacks the dough, I don’t know how Naomi is a better alternative to Lucius, but still, she will not give in! Well, until she succumbs to the mighty lance of Lucius Knight.
The rest of the story is tediously familiar. Mommy issues, deadbeat daddies, “this is just sex and fun until I say otherwise, and then I’d whine that it’s still fun and games with the other person” drama, and other oh-so-overdone nonsense are all crammed inside here, culminating with a complete WTF last minute drama in which Lucius decides that, because his dad is a deadbeat adulterous ass and his mother is a slutty ho bag who put out to a married man, this translates to him being incapable of love and hence not good enough for Naomi. Don’t ask me how that is even halfway logical – the author probably runs out of ideas on how to fill up her last handful of pages, so this crap may as well just do.
Taming Her Tycoon is just another flogging of a dead horse when it comes to tired and unimaginative storytelling, and the author’s stilted, wooden tell-all show-nothing style of writing only adds to the tedium. The lack of logic when it comes to many of the characters’ motivations and antics is, of course, a very special kind of bonus for all you readers who unwittingly picked up this book.
