Review: Heroine Killed It
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 11 10, 2013
At the first page of reading this book, I had the thrill of knowing I was about to read an awesome book. You know when you get that feeling? You can’t wait to keep reading.Then, oh my gosh, how do I explain this story? I fell in love with the hero and thought the heroine was a PITA at about half way. Enough so I stopped reading for a while. How much spitting and fighting am I meant to take from a heroine of a story?Now it was a gradual thing, it snuck up on me, but think about it… The heroine refuses marriage to the hero at every turn, longs to make love with him (again), but is the rudest and silliest woman. TSTL, I hate so say it, but she is. She gets herself into situations over a note where she contemplated a bullet rather than being scalped by Indians. If she had waited to ask the hero what the note meant …This book, this book, it just makes me want to weep … it had so much potential. All the author needed to do was to make the heroine fight a little less, still have her be true to character, but at every turn she’s having an argument with the hero. And the hero is being humorous and good natured to her, offering her a partnership so she can learn the family business.Honestly, it’s become an effort to be in the presence of someone like her, reading her actions like she’s constantly running away, insulting him for no reason, acting like she’s a few fries short of a Happy Meal.The reason I’m so frustrated by this novel is that the writer is amazing!!! She brings me in so deep and I love that. Except this time, I’m brought deep to a woman like Lauren who doesn’t know about her past, insults the people doing her good and argues, fights, attacks, threatens, blames, denounces and wants to sell her body at every opportunity to the hero.She’s angry the hero told her friend about her sleeping with him and another man is saying she must take the hero up on his offer of marriage. Well, she blames the hero for that! Nice, huh? Last time I checked it took two to tango.But immediately she tells him she doesn’t want to see the hero ever again, she will never ever marry him, and that they have no partnership so he can hand over her inheritance. All because she says she’s been chastised, coerced and harassed all morning—by well-meaning friends who are only looking out for her. The harassment lasted for a few lines and the heroine stormed off in a huff after insulting her friends. The hero never told them exactly what happened; just that she’d been with him. He’s in love with her, trying at every opportunity to get close to her, show her what a true partnership between them would be like. He was awesome, simply awesome. He saved her life, but she doesn’t trust him.The hero is so crazy in love with her that is the only thing that keeps the story going. Around halfway, I still thought the heroine wanted him for his body and had no particular special feelings for him.He thinks he’s the luckiest man on earth, poor sod.Every idea the man has, this woman has to contradict him, or she wants something else, not because it’s a better idea, but because she’s still stuck in the idea that she’s not Andrea, so she can’t have any of her inheritance money that would be Andrea’s. But no one can tell her that she really is Andrea! She’ll probably end up in a mental institution; she’s that close to blowing a fuse. If the hero told her, she would scream, cause a fuss, try to beat him up probably and then run away again and end up at the bottom of the sea.When the hero has to leave for a few days, she’s curt and angry with him when he doesn’t reveal why. Man, it’s probably to save his sanity!When he’s gone, she insults him to one of his best friends behind his back. Such a woman! @@ oh, that’s me rolling my eyes. Every word the friend says, she takes offense to, even when it has absolutely nothing to do with her, she thinks it’s an attack on her and acts like a bitch.When she learns that the hero had ladies lining up to marry him in England, she asks casually, without any hint of feeling for him whatever, why did he not marry them. I don’t know, but I remember reading this book as a child by Roald Dahl, titled The Twits.The hero offers her a night at the theatre or she can go to the casino by herself if she wishes, but she really wants to go to the theatre. Instead of saying thank you, she accepts the hero’s offer like this: “Not very graciously, Lauren nodded her acquiescence.”She longs to be ‘not so easily managed’, well I must have blinked and missed that part. Easily managed? Shouldn’t she promise to follow her heart and do what she really wants to, rather than just promise to fight with everyone all the time?Oh my lord, and then the TSTL heroine makes a deal with another man, not the hero, and if he wins he gets a night with her. She must love sex or something to want to bargain her body at every turn.The hero is trying to prepare her so she’ll be on equal footing with him once he hands over her inheritance, but she screams at him that he wants her inheritance …. It just starting getting soooooo old this whole, you only want me for my money.She even says to him that she knows he needs heirs and asks if he would change his mind about marriage if she refused to give him children. It became a train wreck reading, you know, can’t look away, moment of impact is imminent.Still, I couldn’t convince myself to start the third act. DNF.