Sand Dune Books, $2.99, ISBN 978-1-62237-475-5
Contemporary Romance, 2017

Now, I belong to a generation that predates 21st century feminism, but even I find myself narrowing my eyes at the first chapter of Maddie James’s The Christmas Nanny, when our hero Rob Black’s BFF tells him to hire a female, yes specifically a female, nanny to take care of four kids.

Excuse me, but does it have to the woman to take care of kids? What year is this and why are we still acting like strong brave heroes will melt if they had to do some parenting?

Furthermore, Rob volunteers to take care of his brother’s kids while the man and his wife go off on a second honeymoon, and he is a grown-ass man, so I don’t know why he can’t man up and do what he promised to do.

This premise makes me annoyed because, yes, our hero will find a free nanny with benefits true love that will conveniently take those brats off his hands so that those hands can caress the heroine’s ample assets instead.

So yes, Rob is the casting director of some Christmas play in the small town of Harbor Falls, and our heroine Wynter Holly for some reason sees getting cast as the lead in a small town play is the peak of her acting career. I guess she isn’t aiming too high as we all know a romance heroine’s true vocation is a baby popping machine.

Wynter is another quirky heroine. Yes, that sort to talk aloud to herself, sing aloud too, get drunk a lot, and constantly flail at doing anything right because aww, dumb-dumb heroines are so cute.

She latched on to Lisa’s arm and they stumbled two steps away from the bar. “Snappy, frappy, cosmo-mappy. Sure thing, Zachy-poo. Be back in a snrap.”

See? So quirky! Who needs a personality when she is just haw-haw so dumb like this?

Needless to say, she also has no career and no money, so I guess it’s a fair business trade to put out to the casting director for a role and some money.

Of course, that’s not outright stated in this story. The whole thing is true love, you know, not a business transaction.

Anyway, what follows is an unnecessarily convoluted tale involving fake identities and nanny gigs that end up making both main characters look ridiculous and, in poor Wynter’s case, even more stupid.

Really, the poor heroine is already made by the author to be a failure in every way and has nowhere to go but down unless she finds a rich sugar daddy because she is sadly too much of a brainless tart to do anything more than lying on her back and taking it from the hero.

Wynter’s not a terrible person by any mean, but yikes, she is basically set up to be such a huge fail in life that this romance becomes way more tawdry and even sordid than the author probably intended it to be, as the “romance” here is basically the only way the heroine can say that she has done something right in her life.

Why does the author do this? Does she think that a romance isn’t touching or heartwarming unless the heroine is barely functional?

At the end of the day, Wynter’s only calling is being a mom and a wife. Thankfully, she’s happy playing these roles, but god, will it kill the author to give poor Wynter some agency in this story as well as some measure of functional brainpower?

This story could have just been Rob’s quest to hire an actual nanny instead, and something tells me that that story would have been a less heartbreaking than this one: a tale of a heroine that is such as a sad, sad failure of a human being that she must marry the hero or god knows what will happen to her. This isn’t romance, more like the hero’s act of Christmas charity.