Grand Central Publishing, $6.99, ISBN 978-1-4555-5189-7
Contemporary Romance, 2015
“Unlike you, Bay, I can’t ignore that much money. And I don’t want a job. I want to be like Aunt Frances and spend my summers in Italy and my winters in Cancún.”
Five pages into Katie Lane’s Unwrapped and I am already feeling the festive mood to wrap several strings of Christmas lights around heroine Jacqueline Maguire’s throat. I have no issues with wanting to have lots of money in order to live a life of leisure, mind you, but I can’t stand it when the heroine wants this and only this, and if she doesn’t get it, she’d stamp her foot and act like a childish imbecile until someone hands it to her.
As per the wonderful proclamation from our heroine, she wants to live an adventurous life. However, don’t be fooled into thinking that this means cavorting with a harem of hunky studs, with that bad boy for lunch and this roguish charmer for dinner, all the while rolling in champagne and diamonds. No, Jac actually thinks that sex is overrated because the men she’d ever let into her Christmas bunker aren’t so hot, so she wants adventures minus the sex with hot guys or girls or even barnyard animals part. Actually, she doesn’t want to do anything too fun or slutty, as the author is worried that I may consider Jac a promiscuous whore, tell all my friends, and then nobody will buy this book. So, Jac is just… an addled Harlequin Temptation heroine-wannabe, who just does stupid things until the hero plugs into her a reason for living.
Jac’s plan is to find a husband, as per the stipulation of a stupid will, in order to get her hands on enough money to live life as a sexless hippopotamus in Italy and Cancún. This husband, she states, must be a man desperate for money. That way, she will get him to sign a prenup, which also includes a clause that no penis shall ever enter her vagina during this marriage period (the reason being plot, of course), and then, once the year is up, they’d divorce and she’d then get to… oh, does it matter? We all know that she’d get porked by the hero and then spends the next two hundred pages reeling in confusion because she wants that thing bad but at the same time she is certain that the relationship is a sham – even if she wanted a sham relationship in the first place – and the reeling will go on until the author meets her word count and I feel like breaking a plate over somebody’s head.
While she is looking for an ideal guy – for some reason, men wanting to get their paws on so much money without even having to have sex with the cow that comes with it are so hard to find – she leaves behind a string of men jilted at the altar. So, in addition to being an imbecile, our heroine also makes it a habit to get her hubby-to-be to spend a lot of money before running off without even a gracious goodbye. Heroine of the year – I can feel it.
Oh, and Jac is convinced that every man she sees wants to either kill or rape her. I really wish the “killing” part is true, because what I wouldn’t give for this to be a procedural thriller and Jac to end up as victim number two to some serial killer.
Her latest jilting leads her to some accident on some snowy countryside during a storm and she ends up shacking up with our hero Patrick McPherson. Patrick is a committed bachelor who only wants to wave that thing between his legs around without committing to a relationship, and apparently the sight of the hot Jac babbling about men out to kill her turns him on so much that who cares about condom. So yes, this is how the poor brat is conceived.
They decide to go ahead and try to have a parent of the brat thing between the two of them, but because both of them are shallow, immature idiots with barely three brain cells to share between them, plenty of childish theatrics follow. He’s a bit better than her, though, because at least he resembles a human being at times, while Jac is just a shrieking, screaming, flailing selfish and self-absorbed twat who can’t even try to be slutty-funny in order to be even a little interesting. She is just a bag of pus, period.
And this exchange, happening late in the story when these two should be growing up, says it all.
“Spoiled and selfish?” She rubbed her wrist. “Let’s talk about spoiled and selfish, shall we? You leave me in a two-bedroom frat house with nothing but a pack of animals and your blow-up sex doll to keep me company while you work fourteen hours a day. Then you stagger home too tired to do much more than suck down the dinner I spent hours cooking, get your jollies, and fall fast asleep.”
“And that gave you the right to pull some Martha Stewart shit on me and charge up my credit card without once asking me if it was okay?”
And that sound you hear is the poor fetus begging for Mommy to slip down the stairs so that the poor kid will never be born and never have to endure a barren, bleak childhood under the “parenting” of these two immature, unlikable, and loud wastes of flesh.
