Michelle Love, $2.99, ISBN 979-8215100523
Contemporary Romance, 2022
Michelle Love’s The Billionaire’s Agreement is a bizarre story.
Let me try to make sense of it.
When the story opens, Amelia Mason is having sex with Silas Wolfenden. Sadly, despite that name, he’s not a werewolf, so furry aficionados have better don’t get too excited. Anyway, they are both happy, orgasmic, and ecstatic.
Then out of the blue comes Kirk, her friend from way back. He reminds her of that promise they made in college—they would marry one another if they were both still single at 30—so now he’s come to marry her.
She says no, so he sues her for breach of contract. Amelia wails that she can’t afford the lawyer fees so boo-hoo-hoo.
Thankfully, she has a hot man in her life, so they get married—take that, Kirk!
Kirk gets mad and tries to hurt Amelia because he’s a psycho that apparently had stalked her but somehow didn’t do anything to woo her up to this point, and then he gets bopped out of the picture and it’s time for a happily ever after.
Seriously, is this what plotting has been reduced into? How does any of this make for compelling or even reasonably entertaining reading?
Of course, things could work, perhaps amazingly so, if the author had gone balls to the wall over the top and turned this story into a farce, but sadly, the author is instead dead earnest about the whole thing.
It doesn’t help that the story is clumsily put together, with everything being one long interminable infodump from start to finish, punctuated by characters giving one another stilted and awkwardly constructed exchanges. The moment any character has a thought or experiences an emotion, they will immediately blab out everything to the people around them because there is no subtlety anymore in storytelling.
Anyway, let’s just forget this thing. If a billionaire wants to marry me, I’m available regardless of my current marital or relationship status so long as there is plenty of generosity and unlimited credit that comes with the proposal. I’m just saying.
