Bantam, $5.99, ISBN 0-553-58241-0
Paranormal Romance, 2001
Maybe it’s because the author ambitiously tries to tackle the theme of true love thrice in just 308 pages (large print), but no matter how interesting is the premise of Your Wish Is My Command, the characters and their relationships never actually engage my attention. I have been putting this book down and going my merry way watching TV and reading other books for several weeks now, at one point even forgetting that I was reading this book. I only remembered when I started hunting for that “missing bookmark” of mine – oh, there it is, between the pages of this book.
This one features a pirate genie matchmaking two women with their true loves while falling for the third woman (the one who summoned him). Jamie Sullivan doesn’t believe in love. She is looking for an extension cord, not a genie, when she rummages through stuff in the attic of her new home. She finds a magic sword, fiddles with it, and hey ho, Sebastien the Pirate Genie appears in skin-tight breeches and announces that he is at her service.
One day, one day, I’d love to read of a woman who faces such a genie and announces that her first wish is “A first-hand intimate knowledge of the mother of all multiple orgasms, so strip those tight breeches now, buster!” Maybe one day.
Back to the story, Sebastien is an unusual genie. Actually, he’s not really a genie. Once, he was a horny goat who debauched a powerful priestess’s virgin daughter and as a result, the witch cursed her to play Cupid for all time. So, if Jamie could introduce him to a few friends, he will find them their true love, and then he’ll be on his way.
Jamie’s friends can’t fall hard enough. So do Jamie and Sebastien for each other. But Jamie is determined to be remain love-free and Sebastien realizes that he has to find her a soulmate or he won’t… well, let’s just say he has to find her a true love too. That doofus doesn’t seem to get the idea that maybe he is her true love.
True Love is a big thing in romance novels. True Love must come accompanied with firecrackers, pots of money, expensive caviar, and enduring artificial-stimulant-free stamina from the hero. In Your Wish Is My Command, 308 pages of True Love don’t cut it exactly. The whole pace seems rushed, and the other two True Lovers In Love couple don’t seem to know each other that well to convince me that their love is true and will last past the honeymoon stage. Jamie and Sebastien, the main couple, have a bit more space allocated to them and hence are a bit better developed as characters, but they too remain barely one-note creations. Jamie is the usual no-love-please been-burned heroine while Jamie is refreshingly baggage-free but dang, commitment appears too late in both these two’s dictionary. Their romance seems rushed – boink, no, boink, I love you, I love you too baby (lemme think a bit longer) okay, yes, yes, yes, YES! The end.
Your Wish Is My Command is fun and its short length and breezy pace make for easy reading, but I can’t help feeling that this story may have been heavily truncated from a larger omnibus sized manuscript. And I can’t help but to wonder what may result if this story is longer, maybe in a trilogy format. Probably magic, not this well-not-quite-there affair that is this one.
