Kimani, $6.50, ISBN 978-0-373-86317-4
Contemporary Romance, 2013
Truly Yours is the second standalone entry into Deborah Fletcher Mello’s The Boudreaux Family series. The members of the family in question are all overachievers and super achievers who also happen to be the epitome of physical perfection. And yet, they somehow manage to find other people as amazing as they are, to produce more perfect spawns. The whole thing resembles some kind of master plan to conquer the world through selective breeding.
In this story, we meet Darryl Boudreaux, a super engineer who is also super rich and super amazing in bed, in addition to being super hot and super… everything. He finds himself working with hot and talented Camryn Charles, an architect whose most important asset – her rear end – is compared by Darryl to “oversized melons”, and he means this as a compliment. As it happens, my husband brought home two very large watermelons from his trip to a friend’s farm, and I made a mistake of looking at them before turning back to this phrase. I can’t help but to shudder, but I guess everyone has a right to enjoying his or her fetish without judgment from me.
Unfortunately, Darryl’s ex-girlfriend is a crazy gun-totting “I’ll slash your wheels and slit your throat for smiling at some other girl, but I love you so you’ll forgive me, right?” creature, and yes, she doesn’t get the memo that she’s now an ex-girlfriend. Will she cause trouble as Darryl and Cam start snuggling up together? Do you really have to ask?
There’s some decent romance in here. Cam and Darryl have some charming funny moments, some tender heartfelt scenes, and some episodes of sizzling sexual tension. Unfortunately, these two are constantly described to be so physically and intellectually perfect that they have no chance of being even remotely resembling human beings. Since they are also surrounded by the network of Boudreaux family and sequel baits past and future, the entire congregation of good guys form a basically impregnable fortress of pure awesome. There is hardly any suspense at all as to whether these two would falter even a little in their happy march to the bedroom and down the aisle.
Because Darryl is part of So Much More Perfect Than You family, he can’t be wrong even a little, so poor Cam often ends up being wrong or, even at times, too emotional at her job to be as great and smart as the author claims the darling is. Mind you, Cam gets to where she is because her father owns the company, so Cam’s so-called capabilities are also tainted by the stench of nepotism.
At the end of the day, there is just too much exaggeration in Truly Yours for me to take it seriously. The fabulous is too fabulous, the crazy is too crazy, and there is hardly any plausible and interesting conflict. Just a non-stop razzle and dazzle of the impossibly great main characters and their friends, to the point that this one is almost a parody of itself.
