Review: Dumb
Rating: 1 out of 5
Date: 08 11, 2013
Wow! This book is a bit unexpected. It has an amusing premise, but that is all it has. The characters are flat with manufactured pathos that never felt... real? researched? skimmed? The plot was boring. There was some badly written Dom/sub action put in there for "Look at me, I'm so naughty" effect, perhaps by someone whose only exposure to the subject is a Lifetime movie or documentary. The Dom/sub dimension also had a flavor of "True love doesn't need toys" haughtiness to it. All of this added up to a book that was boring.The unexpected part of the book was hell-on-wheels happy ending that the last couple of chapters twisted into. It was like being an adult riding the kiddie locomotive ride that all amusement parks seem to have and the ride suddenly jumping onto a roller coaster track. You got on because the ride looked amusing, realize two minutes in that you weren't having even a modicum of fun but feel stuck, then it all goes horribly wrong. This was a steam-roller of a happy ending. It didn't care about previous characterizations or relationship dynamics. It wasn't afraid of including deus ex machina plot twists. There was going to be a happy ending, puppies-be-darned! I'm not going to spoil the ending, but don't take that as an endorsement of this book.I came back and edited this review because of issues about this book that was nagging at me and now I have words for them. There are spoilers in this paragraph. Will and Blake get into a fight and it comes out that Blake was Will's first trick. This is thrown out there as a declaration to the reader that Will isn't actually a whore, like a hustler wouldn't qualify as a lead in a romance book. It later comes out that Will's parents had thrown him out after they found out he was gay. He lived on the streets, turning tricks to survive, until a youth shelter took him in and connected him with a guy who takes Will in and raises him right. So Blake was only Will's first trick, THIS time. It felt like such a classic 'have your cake and eat it too' setup. Will is a whore, but not really a whore, but he was a whore. What? That leads into the second thing that riled me up, which is where at the end of the happy ending, the bow on top, was them having an in vitro fertilization baby. You're telling me that Will as a man who was tossed out of his own home and then lived on the street, before being adopted, albeit unofficially, by someone he came to love as a father, Will as a man in bad financial straits who still found the time to volunteer at a youth shelter, wouldn't adopted himself? Really?I would NOT recommend this book to anyone, except someone I was trying to discourage from the genre or an awful date I never wanted to see again. Please save your money, for it is too late for me...