Review: The Real Ideal Millionaire
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 04 3, 2013
3.5 STARS"Happiness isn't a pre-requisite for getting hurt. You can get hit by a truck when you're miserable. But if you're happy, at least you can say you had something good and worthwhile in your life at some time. Who wants to be on their deathbed thinking, well, gee, I had a safe life? In seventy-odd years, when you're being put in the ground I want to order a headstone that tells the world you had a full life. That you had lots of love and pain and happiness and loss"I've been raised a sloth and will most probably die out of atherosclerosis with the lifestyle I've been keeping up. So this book's blurb doesn't exactly agree with who I am and at first glance since the thought of yoga gives me hives (I did try it once and the heat DID give me hives).Imagine my surprise when I found myself connecting with Dee as a character.Our heroine, Dee is a yoga instructor who denounces making plans beyond two weeks after having confronted by a the fact that all her plans for the future can go pfft at the slightest kink in the road. She lives her life passively letting the ashes of her accident fall where they may and builds her present state from there. She meets Ethan Roxburgh a millionaire who seems to have life and his s*** all figured out.Okay so far, that's two things that gives me hives: yoga AND millionaire hero.But Ethan, thank God, isn't cut from the same cloth as THAT millionaire stereotype. Their story actually started out with Dee being flat broke and accepting a job as an ad model for an insurance company which Ethan is also involved with. He eventually takes Dee under his business-savant wings and mentors her on the ins and outs of business. That detail, I think is what I liked the most out of this book: when Ethan found Dee's financial mess, he didn't buy her a house, or a car or throw her money because you know, he's rich.He taught her how to make it on her own.If that doesn't make you swoon, then you're probably too young to realize how important that is in the real world. See if I was dating a hot millionaire businessman right now (my mind is drawing a blank on who. There's a serious lack of hot millionaires and billionaires in the world, I think) I don't want him to buy me things. I'd want him to teach me how to become a millionaire myself so I can buy all the things I want on my own.Take that, Christian Grey. Practicality FTW.The book had been pleasant enough of a read. A bit too polite for my tastes maybe, but the lack of high octane drama wasn't to its detriment to be sure. The secondary characters did the job in fleshing out Dee's character. I particularly liked how her relationship with her mother was handled. The funny bits were a bit too slapsticky and the dialogue only managed to get a smile out of me, no guffaws of any sort. Despite being a professional yoga instructor, Dee had one too many klutzy encounters that it was a serious feat that she didn't end up dead, in a cast or killed someone by chapter 10."He must think she was a complete idiot. He was so sensible and professional and she was a walking disaster whenever he was around. The tally was growing longer - cheesecakes in the face, escaping breasts, falling down, throwing coffee at herself."It felt like it was striving a little too hard on the cute. Maybe the goal was for this to end up as a rom-com film, but across the pages it didn't really do much for me.  The pacing was also a bit slow in the beginning and the build up towards Dee and Ethan lacked a certain charm that I didn't feel a gripping need for them to end up together.But these were personal preference issues and on any level I think this book was well-written and light-hearted enough to allow me to recuperate after some migraine reads.<i>This was an ARC provided by the publishers thru NetGalley which I neglected to review on-time. See? Sloth.</I>