Review: Great erotica...problematic heroine
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 09 15, 2013
Hmmm.... So I have now read a few books by this author and my response to her work is as consistent as I feel her books are. She writes great love scenes and character stories. However the dialogue and story-plotting are weak.If your favorite part of any romance or erotic-romance is the piece where the two characters explore each other and fall in love (and have lots of sexy sex) then I think you'd enjoy this book. If you need more of a surrounding story to place that falling in love within some larger context, then you will not enjoy it.Needless to say, I am somewhere in the middle. I can appreciate this book for the character exploration and for the ...if not story...then the narrative she is presenting. However I still need more....something to happen.I did like the hero, Van. I actually enjoy this author's heroes way more than I heroines. I think she treads the fine line between making her heroes very authoritative and commanding without making them true alphas. They have a lot of alpha signifiers except they are given qualities that make them feel truer to life than your typical romance novel hero. Van is this. A man who left his own rather dysfunctional wealthy family to live on his own. He just wants the honesty of working for a living and knowing that he earned his way. He is big, tatted, mohawked and smokes pot recreationally. I liked all those aspects of him. It made him relatable.I did not like the heroine as much. Honestly this heroine suffers for me mostly because of her close association with other heroines of this author. They tend to be very down on themselves. they think they are not pretty or fat or not worthy of the hero. I personally prefer my heroine to be more independent, have a more active role in their lives or just a bit more self esteem. Evie was too sheltered for me. Yeah she had a lot of impure thoughts, but more than anything she's too cut off from things. Her lack of exposure and power made me twitchy.And finally, the use of the word 'rude' is what in card-playing parlance would be called a 'tell' with this author. It is her shorthand for naughty or forbidden. Rude places (usually the ass), rude things (usually a finger going into an ass) and....well rude holes (...say it with me now ... the ass). It is a small thing but it just jumps right out of the text because it is used as a descriptor a lot and not just in this book.In the end I did like this book and do recommend with the dialogue and plotting caveats.