Mills & Boon, £3.30, ISBN 978-0-263-88684-9
Contemporary Romance, 2011

Now, three oogies are more of less the score for any Modern romance that doesn’t leave me reeling in pain, but don’t get too excited. Michelle Reid’s The Kanellis Scandal is alright as long as the reader can accept that the entire thing takes place in about a day and the heroine’s rather unbalanced state of mind doesn’t make this romance feel exploitative.

Failure to accept these two fundamental aspects of the story can leave the reader reeling in pain indeed.

In this one, the heroine Zoe Ellis is going through a phase that leaves her very vulnerable. She’s 22 and a virginal, desperate heroine in a Modern romance, so her intelligence is already set to underwhelming by default. She’s just buried her parents and she has a baby brother to raise when she has no funds and nothing, and she also just realizes that her father was the long-disowned or long-lost son of the aging Greek billionaire geezer Theo Kanellis.

Oh, don’t worry, Theo isn’t the hero, not because that would be creepy and likely illegal in Greece—can someone look that up for me?—plus he’s old, which automatically puts him out of the running to be the first bloke to deflower Zoe even if that would be legal over there.

Instead, the hero is Anton Pallis, who is definitely old enough to trigger Zoe’s daddy issues but young enough to retain a full crown of hair, washboard tummy, and all. He’s been Theo’s number two and the guy running the company all this while, and now he’s going to bring the baby brat of a grandson to Theo. Oh, and he’s also going to marry Zoe because it’s hot to be a gold digger when you are a hot hero.

Zoe spends the entire story being led around by Anton, never really questioning or suspecting anything until she realizes she’s been had or misled by Anton, upon then she’d hiss and hurl accusations at him until she sort of forgets, I guess, and goes all koochie-hoochie with him again.

Indeed, the entire plot can be summed up as “let’s just lead the silly bint around”. However, I can cut the heroine a lot of slack here because she’s just lost her parents and now she’s kidnapped by the hero and is constantly paranoid about losing her baby brother forever to Theo.

It’d be easy to give Anton the side eye, but he’s not a cruel jerk or woman hater here, so that elevates him considerably over his fellow Modern heroes. I don’t blame him for not wanting to lose everything he’d worked so hard to build, plus the author does a good job in showing me that he does care for Zoe in a way.

Also, I can’t argue that Zoe needs someone like him to make decisions and do the thinking for her. She’s not exactly the kind that can be trusted to cross the street on her own and make it to the other side with all her body parts intact, much less raise a baby without adult supervision.

Hence, I can’t say that this romance feels wrong—by a stroke of luck, Zoe has found the guy that is exactly right for her, even if she didn’t have the intellectual prowess to recognize that fact.

Another thing, an entertaining one, is that the author is clearly using Anton to channel her barely-disguised contempt for the heroine. Somehow, I have a feeling that the author really, really doesn’t like having to write this particular plot as foisted on her by her employer editor.

So, here we have Anton ruthlessly puncturing all of Zoe’s delusions, not mincing words one bit as he keeps telling her how she’s a selfish emotional brat for wanting to deprive her brother of all that money and luxury, how she’s just going to drag her brother into a miserable life if she tried to raise him on her own, and how she has no plan, no clue, and no hope of even raising her brother in a halfway functional manner. I do love a man that is honest and cuts straight to the point!

In the end, there are many things to dislike about this one, especially with the romance not being very believable due to the heroine’s state of mind and the one-day thing, but it still manages to work as a showcase of the author doing her best to make this broken story line work. The fact that the author uses the hero in an amusing manner to all but show the middle finger to those that made her do this story is only cherry on top.

Hence, while I may appreciate this one for all the not-so-right reasons, I do appreciate it nonetheless. Ergo, three oogies.