Kimani, $6.50, ISBN 978-0-373-86312-9
Contemporary Romance, 2012
To Have a Wilde is part of the Wilde in Wyoming series, but it is set in the Kealoha Ranch in Hana, Big Island. That’s in Hawaii, which is, the last I checked, in the Pacific Ocean instead of in any of Wyoming’s lakes. Still, there is a link to the previous books in the series, thanks to a randy sperm fertilizing an egg of a woman that wasn’t married to the man whose pee-pee it came from. That is not a spoiler, by the way, since the name of the series itself gave it away.
Meet Keanu “Key” Kealoha. He and his twin brother Nick run the family ranch with Alekanekelo, who turns out not to be their father after all. His late mother conveniently left behind a pile of letters chronicling her thing with another dude, so the two brothers now have proof that a sperm had wiggled into where it didn’t belong. You know, if I hate my kids, I’m so going to write fake letters chronicling my love affair with a well-endowed velociraptor, borrowing parts from the current bestselling dinosaur romances, for them to find and get all emo over.
Anyway, daddy woes aside, the two brothers are currently the hottest things on reality TV after they allowed themselves and the ranch to be the subject of a reality TV show. Key – note to self: stop rolling eyes when mentioning his nickname – wants to use the show to promote the foundation build in his late mother’s name and espouse green messages that PETA would approve (“Go hump a happy horse today!”). Therefore, the show is all tasteful and edifying despite the man candy, so we shouldn’t confuse the whole thing with Jersey Shore.
In this story, producer Sonia Brandon is about to learn that all those “lei’d in Hawaii” jokes have a ring of truth to them as Key aims his thirty-inch cylinder of sex appeal right at her.
When these two finally get down to dancing all night to the best song ever, the heat level of this story rises above that of a typical Kimani story. However, to get there, I have to sit through dull and occasionally fragmented sentences after sentences depicting non-stop mental lusting and lust-engorged aching body parts. The weird thing here is that these two don’t actually interact with each other much. They indulge in far more mental lusting, to the point that these two may as well just stand there and stare at one another as they drool and think naughty thoughts.
When they are not thinking about how hot the other person is, they are thinking about the same handful of things over and over and over. Seriously, the level of repetition here is pretty impressive. Every time a slice of information is brought up, it’d be repeated at least three times, often within the next dozen pages. When these two characters do remember to actually do something, they interact with secondary characters in filler scenes that rarely move the story in any way.
It is only late in the story that the silly conflicts pile on. It is as if the author realized that she had only a dozen or so pages to go and went, “Oh snap, I need to make these people argue over something or people would accuse my story of being a sleeping pill!” Yes, it’s that banal “I immediately make snap judgments about what a scheming hussy you are!” thing, but it’s okay – Key literally shags his way into her good graces again. One Direction is wrong – it’s not the song that is the best ever, it’s the pee-pee. It goes oh-oh-oh, it goes yeah-yeah-yeah, and yes, he can take her home with him.
Sonia can have him. I know you know I know that I will never remember this story after a few days.
