Relay Publishing, $0.99, ISBN 978-1393080770
Contemporary Romance, 2019
According to the copyright notice of The Billionaire’s Christmas Fiancée, Leslie North isn’t a single person. It’s a pseudonym created by the publisher to put up a series of connected romances written by different people.
This isn’t something new, it’s been done a few times in the romance genre as well as outside the genre, but I’m then confused when this thing later pushes Leslie North as a single person, a bestselling author to boot. Which is which?
Who knows, but this story is a pretty familiar one—so familiar, in fact, that I wonder whether Leslie North is actually an AI that writes romance based on some kind of algorithm scraped from the bestselling titles on the Kindle list or something.
According to the official synopsis, the billionaire Josh Denton “loved only one woman—his mother, who died a few years back”. Well, that’s one way of getting me to have a good impression of him. Nothing too creepy there, I’m sure.
He wants to buy the Cedar Grove Resort and Spa when it’s listed as for sale, because that was the place in which he spent the last Christmas he ever had with his mother. Unfortunately, the owners of that place are looking for a “family-centric” buyer, so our hero naturally needs a fake marriage to get the deal through.
Amelia is his “efficient and effervescent assistant”, as per the official synopsis, so I’m sure folks can guess where the story is heading. Yes, she needs to get along to get her precious promotion, and this story takes place in a time and place where such practices are okay and not grounds for a lawsuit.
Then again, for this story to work, I have to make myself believe that this story takes place in an alternate Earth. Its an Earth where billionaire bosses have nothing better to do than to tend to day-by-day minutiae that is normally reserved for underlings, and said bosses can just take off from work whenever they feel like it. It’s also one where people can make unreasonable, discriminatory demands on other people without worrying about legal repercussions.
Sure, maybe I’d be happy to suspend my disbelief if the story had been good, but the narrative style is passionless, rolled out in a dry “he did this, he said that; she then said that, and did that” manner that really makes me wonder whether an AI did this thing. Well, either an AI or maybe some freelancer from a third world country that has zero interest or passion in the work, I suppose.
The end result is a robotic recreation of a played-out standard series romance. Even the names of the characters and places feel like something an AI program threw together after analyzing the most popular names in some sample of romance stories. Seriously, of all the names they can pick for the town, they just have to go with Cedar Grove?
Boring, mechanical, predictable… this thing will probably work better on people that have never read a small town romance or a series romance before. Heaven knows, there are many similar stories with similar silly plot out there, only done more in a more emotive manner.
As an AI-generated work, if this is indeed such, well, I’m still not too impressed.
