Kimani, $7.99, ISBN 978-1-335-45843-8
Contemporary Romance, 2019

In Lindsay Evans’s The CEO’s Dilemma, we meet Aisha Clark. She’s an architect that has to be super good, because her colleagues steal her designs and pass them off as theirs, while her bosses ignore her or treat her as insignificant. After all, they are all icky white men while she is a strong, proud black woman.

I’m all for her standing up against oppression and arsehole workplace and what not, but I cringe when I realize that her entire plan hinges on her winning the Sykes Prize that will allow her design to used for the next vanity, er, prestigious project of Sykes Global Corporation.

That’s all? She’s not looking for a better job, consulting a lawyer, or anything else that may reinforce my impression that she’s indeed a woman in charge of her own destiny?

There won’t be a story if everything went as she’d hoped, so the new CEO of the company, the son of the recently deceased boss, cancels the whole project. Enraged, Aisha storms into Roman Sykes’s office, demanding that he reinstate the whole thing or else.

I wonder whether she’s like this with those icky white men that oppress her on a daily basis, or this whole thing is just some half-arsed plot device to get the story going.

I’m also confused by what seems like only Aisha objecting to the cancellation. Shouldn’t lawsuits be flying all over the place by now, as this story takes place in America after all?

Is Aisha the only one that entered the contest, and is that why she won? Hmm, that doesn’t cast the competition in a good light.

Anyway, Roman is a great respecter of hot women with big bosoms, so of course he is soon casting his eyes downward on her prodigious ideas and licking his lips at her delectable opinions. This is how a strong, proud, independent modern woman should be treated, after all.

Oh, and there’s an asterisk at the end of the previous sentence, with the fine print stating that the respect of ugly and fat men is not needed, thanks but no thanks.

You may be wondering why Roman would cancel that thing. Is it because he discovered that his late father led the cultists of Nyarlathotep, and the planned construction is part of some ritual to create a magical gate that will summon some eldritch horror into this world and destroy us all? Perhaps the building were to be built upon the graves of ancient shamans, potentially triggering some dreadful haunting?

No, he instead discovers that his father planned to include a shrine to his late mother in that building, and that triggers Roman so much that he just has to cancel the plans. You see, his father treated his mother badly when the old man was alive, and that shrine is just the dead man’s way to keep that dead woman’s ashes trapped inside a building when Roman knows that his dead mother’s ashes would love nothing more than to be free and…

I have just reread what I typed, blinked, checked back the story to make sure I didn’t misremember anything, and nope, I’m still awake and sadly correct.

How did that rant go again? Stupid rich people so bored with their carefree lives that they have to make up their own problems to get attention or something, I believe?

Seriously, what’s stopping him from flying first class to the Alps, to get naked and spin around while singing The Hills Are Alive and spraying his mother’s ashes all over the place?

The rest of the story is quite disappointing.

The heroine isn’t given any opportunity to show off her awesome architecture-y skills; she’s just awesome because the author tells me so. Instead of a hot and sexy girlboss on top story, I get the usual tale of the heroine having to constantly coddle and assure the hero because he has mommy and daddy issues that keep him from opening his heart to love.

Even then, it’s not the heroine that eventually gets to him. No, he discovers some convenient letters from his dead mother that finally assure him that his heart can be opened as freely as the zipper of his pants, so it’s off to a happily ever after.

Really now? The author builds up Aisha to be this hot and feisty modern woman and she can’t even let our heroine earn a single victory to call her own?

This story is also hard to read because the author pads the story with so much padding.

Sure, the whole “This is a secondary character and here’s that character’s back story even when that character has nothing to do with the plot because I WANT YOU TO BUY THAT BOOK AND BITCH, YOU BETTER DO THAT NOW!” padding is to be expected, as this is after all a Kimani entry, but the author goes the extra mile with extraneous details such as the expensive brands the hero loves, his daily routine, et cetera. The heroine will meet various friends to discuss things that have nothing to do with the overall story—these scenes are just filler.

Because of the padding, the story moves on a lethargic pace without any obvious direction for the most part. There’s no urgency, no build-up, no anticipation, no excitement—it’s hard to feel any of these when the characters meet various people to chat about mundane, inconsequential stuff the moment things are starting to get interesting.

One can argue that this story could have been a compelling and emotional read, with its elements of toxic workplace politics and inter-generational trauma, but the treatment of these elements is so sloppy and superficial that it’s like the author or the editor, maybe both, were afraid that anyone reading this story may feel even a glimmer of strong emotion, and that won’t do at all.

Is that the plan all along? If yes, I’d say the plan had been executed with resounding success.