Laci Paige, $0.99, ISBN 978-0463173060
Contemporary Romance, 2019
Lieutenant Craig Mannings is a fighter pilot for Carrier Air Wing Three. His nickname is Six-Pack, maybe because he smokes six packs of cigarettes a day, I guess. He’s back in good old US of A after eight months of doing patriotic stuff overseas, to still unsigned divorce papers handed to him by his wife Megan before he left her those months ago.
It’s okay. His pee-pee is super hard, and we all know that one look at that thing and a romance heroine immediately forgets why she is mad at the man in the first place.
Now, you may be wondering why Megan wants a divorce. Is she finding the life of a military wife hard to cope? Is she shagging his best friend? Is he shagging his best friend?
No, it’s because she has found out that he was married once before, and she is mad that he never told her.
You may now ask why she is mad. Is it because he’s sneakily paying child support? Is he not paying child support? Has he knocked up the ex-wife?
Surely there must be something dramatic to drive a wedge between them, right?
“Omitting something huge felt like a lie. You know how I was raised, what happened with my mother. My father was a cheating liar. I don’t tolerate lying. You broke our trust. And to have met your ex the way I did? It was so humiliating. I can’t forgive that. It crushed me.” Time had hardened her; she wasn’t crying like the last time they had this discussion. If anything, she was stronger in her decision to divorce him. Hope was fading fast.
Wait until she learns that it is not really ten inches like he told her.
Anyway, how will they resolve this? Will they seek a marriage counselor? Talk to the head of their place of worship for mediation? Have angry sex for three days straight?
Sadly, the rest of the story is a constant, repetitive cycle of “You sign!”, “Nu-uh!”, “How dare you!”, repeat and rinse interspersed by these two acting like children and throwing little sulks and foot stomping all over the place.
Consequently, Laci Paige’s Welcome Home Sir trivializes divorce and the factors leading up to it into some kind of vapid, childish foreplay. It also makes the hero and the heroine appear to have the emotional maturity of two kids pulling at one another’s hair in a playground.
That’s not the way, surely.
