Tabetha Waite, $4.99
Historical Romance, 2021 (Reissue)
According to the copyright notice, Tabetha Waite’s Why the Earl is After the Girl—what a cute title, it even rhymes—was first published by Etopia Press in 2016, and what I am reading is the “2nd edition”. Hence, I assume that this edition is a reissue, but I can be wrong on that so don’t quote me on this.
We begin with a broke-ass heroine. To be fair, it’s not Athena Hawthorne’s fault. She learns upon her father’s death that the man not only had left her no money, but he also sold off the store to pay off his debts. Hey, he still left her two pounds and six pence. That counts for something, right?
Still, our heroine rallies herself. She should start looking for a job. With the money she gets from the job, she intends to buy food find a sugar daddy spend it on private investigators to clear her father’s name because she knows that he was not the kind to lose all his money like that. Guess she’s never heard of the “he’s dead, let it go, go do something productive with yourself” principle.
Our strong and independent heroine then researches networks checks out the unemployment agency seduces a rich tycoon stumbles into the manly embrace of our hero Orion Ashcroft, Earl of Rockford, because heaven forbid our heroine has a big strong moment to make an impression in the reader’s mind. She then proceeds to endear herself to me by being unnecessarily curt and even rude when he apologizes to her, and I am starting to get this feeling that the author is far more intent on following bestseller tropes blindly without fully understanding how her usage of these tropes is affecting her story.
Naturally, Rion is the brother of the lady who is scheduled to interview Athena for the post of her kids’ governess. In other words, the author is not going to let the heroine succeed in anything on her own merit. No, whatever Athena achieves will be tied to the fact that she is so-ooo-ooo fortunate that she literally bumps into a hot, wealthy guy that also happens to be a duke. Sigh, if only we are all this lucky in the people we bump into in our real lives!
Okay, it’s a bit more complicated than that, even if the hero is still responsible for the heroine’s employment.
You see, Rion believes that her father was the mastermind behind his grandmother’s missing “priceless family heirloom”, and Athena is somehow also a criminal and a liar because of this. Hence, he convinces his sister to hire our heroine, all the better for him to spend the rest of the story sneering at Athena, calling her a whore in many different flavors, and generally being an outright unpleasant boor from start to finish.
He will later claim to finally love the heroine, despite various characters including his sister telling her from the very beginning that they know that Athena is a sweetheart, mostly because she gets into all kinds of dangerous situations and requires saving. Guess being a damsel in a distress is the best, maybe only, way to prove one’s purity and innocence to a judgmental asshole.
It’s not like Athena is any better. She keeps saying that she can’t let him ruin her reputation, but at the same time, she puts out and even begs him to put it in whenever she gets horny. Her “Oh! I’m not a ho! I care about my reputation, readers, so don’t hate me!” yammering is totally at odds with her action, which gets annoying because she keeps repeating the same yammering over and over like that’s one of her only three facets of her personality here. The other two, by the way, are “Horny for duke dong!” and “Guess I better bleat about my daddy now and then to remind readers that I haven’t completely ditched him for duke dongs!”
Indeed, this story is full of repetitive “I am hot for him, but I really can’t… okay, I’m putting out again, whee!” and “Ho! She is a ho! But a hot ho that puts out to her, oooh!” bleating and yapping from the two main characters that I soon wish that the ground would just open up under them.
Seriously, the whole thing comes off as so stupid because the main characters’ constant yapping is often vastly disconnected from their actions. I can only wonder whether the author is aware of this. Did anyone edit or proofread this? If yes, how come they never point how Athena and Rion come off as bipolar?
When it’s not bleating from annoying sheep, the story serves up an increasingly convoluted yet perplexingly familiar plot involving the true villains that unravel in a standard pattern composed of boring monologues from secondary characters and the heroine needing to be rescued. Then again, it’s hard to care about the mystery when the key players are both annoying and forgettable.
Oddly enough, the secondary characters are alright, even adorable at times. Then again, this could be because the two main characters are so lacking that these secondary characters appear so much better as a result, hmm.
This is one story that could have been better had it been a much shorter story. A much shorter story means less repetitive whining and fewer scenes of the heroine claiming to be sensible when she’s practically flinging her legs around the unbearably tedious hero’s neck and begging to be porked by him in the same breath—and a much less grumpy me as a result.
