Kimani, $7.99, ISBN 978-1-335-00585-4
Contemporary Romance, 2019

Sometimes fiction is better than reality because in the former, everything aligns perfectly when one is down. You don’t have to earn the nice things; they just come to you because you’re the star of the story!

In Joy Avery’s The Sweet Taste of Seduction, Delanie Atwater wins a pretty good settlement from her now ex-husband just as her uncle died and left her and her brother a vineyard.

Her brother lets her buy out his share, so she’s now the sole owner of a vineyard that she has no idea what to do with, aside from wanting to keep it inside the family instead of selling it off.

Oh, she has to learn Vineyard Management 101? Who cares, the hot guy in town, Ray Cavanaugh already runs a successful neighboring vineyard, so he’ll do all the work and thinking and other boring, tedious adult-ing stuff while she only has to luxuriate in a lifetime of unlimited credit and endless hot sex.

Beautiful, isn’t it?

Well, there’s that thing about him wanting a piece of her land—both literally and figuratively, and it’s the literal part that makes up the half-baked conflict in this story.

Aside from a few things, there’s nothing bad about this one.

The characters are for the most part, likable. Sure, Ray is on the judgmental and hypocritical side with his “small town people are superior” vibes, but he’s not cruel or mean so it’s not like he’s giving me a heart attack anytime soon. The heroine is for the most part sane and sensible, instead of stir-fried crazy served with a slide of haplessness, and all in all, these two are nice characters to read about.

The author’s writing style is easy to read and clean. There are no awkward opening chapter with characters awkwardly narrating what they should already know for the sake of updating the reader, no painful sequel bait parades, and no rambling parts of the characters doing mundane, boring things that serve to bore me and pad up the pages. Unlike some of the Kimani entries in its final few gasps of life, this one actually reads like the author has made a lot of effort to make this an enjoyable ride for the reader.

So, what are the things that make me go hmm?

Well, the foremost issue that I have with this one is that the ink is barely dry on the heroine’s divorce papers when she’s running headlong into a new romance. While there’s nothing wrong with a rebound fling with a hot and nice guy, it’s hardly a believable foundation to a happily ever after, especially when right up to almost the very end, Delanie still harbors many serious hang-ups and insecurities when it comes to love and relationships.

Then there’s Ray. Right up to nearly the bitter end, he has his own townie versus small town insecurities that see him making all kinds of weird and neurotic judgments and assumptions about Delanie, culminating with this bizarre belief that she’d run back to her ex. All of this without her giving him many credible reasons to feel this way, mind you, so I can only assume that this fellow also has his own issues when it comes to relationships.

Also, his idea of her proving her love is all about doing what he wants and making decisions that are convenient or good for him, so I’m not getting good vibes about the longevity of the happiness in this relationship.

The romance, in fact, is strongly fueled by Ray’s mother and other folks around town continuously telling him and Delanie that they must, they should, they really ought to shag and get married because, despite barely knowing the new arrival from town, these people already know that she is meant for him.

To the author’s credit, she manages to make all this seem more like delusional but well-meaning busybodies in action, rather than a cult selecting a brood mare to bear the Antichrist baby, but in the end, the happy ending still feels forced, a result of various factors forcing the hero and the heroine to bump loins instead of it being some natural evolution of a developing romance.

So yes, while I do enjoy this one, I’m afraid I don’t buy the romance. The hero and the heroine still have a lot of baggage coming into the happily ever after, and I’m not so naïve to believe that a ring on the finger will magically erase this baggage of theirs.