Kimani, $6.50, ISBN 978-0-373-86351-8
Contemporary Romance, 2014

Alythia Duffy, workaholic (of course), is cajoled into attending her best friend’s wedding (of course) in the Caribbean (of course), where she will let the bridegroom’s good friend do push-ups on her (of FREAKING course).

Okay, before you guys throw up your hands in the air and mutter “Oh, not another one of those Kimani!”, there is one possible saving grace to this story: everyone in this story is trashy and nasty, so this story is a train wreck in motion. It may be possible for folks to find some macabre joy in reading this one.

Orchid Benjamin, unfortunately called “Ork” by everyone although it’s probably better than “Orc”, is getting hitched to her on-off walking vibrator Jayson Muns. Her friends Alythia and Myrna Fisher will be attending her bachelorette party in the Caribbean. Meanwhile, Jayson will be bringing along his BFFs Gage Vincent (our hero) and the future walking vibrator for Myrna… uh, what’s his name again? Who cares, trash bags don’t need names.

Anyway, these three couples soon hook up (not in an orgy way, they just pair up) even on their flight itself, and the rest of the story sees Gage and Alythia waffling and padding the pages for who knows why. I mean, they’ve done most things in a matter of a few hours that other couples may take at least a few dates to get there.

Our heroine has only two aspects to her personality: workaholic and “tears up when she thinks of her dead mom”. Our hero is… well, he’s the usual standard rich bollocks without much else that be constituted as “character”. They waffle, try to put off the inevitable happy ending because the author hasn’t met the word count of a full length Kimani story yet, and get dragged into the trashy drama of the other two couples.

Oh, and they also have sex a lot. Unfortunately, those scenes are not graphic enough to serve as effective forms of titillation and distraction from the non-happenings in the rest of the story. It’s hilarious, though, how the author keeps insisting to the reader that the heroine is actually prim and proper, far too busy to indulge in immoral harlotry, when I am reading with my own eyes how Gage only has to give the horny sign and Alythia immediately assumes the position, any position, for the \O/. Who’s the author trying to fool anyway?

The other two men are trashy hos that think of women as barely any better than those devices men order from online to stick their lonely pee-pees into. Gage is somewhat better in that he treats Alythia better than those two men with their ho-ho-hos, but since he’s friends with them, I can’t help but to wonder when his inner trash bag self will emerge.

The women aren’t any better. Get them drunk and they soon tear into one another like thirsty hos fighting over Chris Hemsworth’s soiled underpants. There is a sad realism to their dynamics: point out that their man is treating them badly, and they immediately turn on the messenger for being jealous or trying to come between them and their trash bag man.

Come to think of it, I don’t even know why the three women are friends. They seem unable to tolerate one another’s presence, and they only appear happy when they are talking to one another about the men they want to bone.

At the end of the day, Trust in Us is filled with cringe-inducing, embarrassing caterwauling and drunken shrieking that only serves to remind me why I prefer to avoid weddings beyond showing up, handing over the expected gifts, and then fleeing after a reasonably polite length of time.

While I’m on the topic, why do so many people spend so much money on weddings anyway? It’s only a day, less than a day sometimes, and when alcohol is offered, most of the people attending the big day won’t even recall the day much. At least the characters here can afford the expenses and the shame that go into the spectacularly trashy wedding preparations, I guess.

Oh, and the ending sees the couple preparing to, from all appearances, flee an assault charge by going to some place that I hope doesn’t have an extradition treaty with America.

Yeah, these people are trash. I suspect some readers will love them because of this. Me, I find the cringe to guilty pleasure ratio to be tilted too much towards the cringe, like I’ve spent way too much time reading Reddit subs dedicated to bridezillas, insane bridesmaids, and trashy bridegrooms. Sure, things may be fun for a few minutes, but stretch the experience any longer and I will start to feel my brain slowly melting into goo.