Review: Not Quite a Homerun
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 03 17, 2013
*ARC was provided by Entangled Publishing via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.*Practice Proposal was a sugary-sweet, happy-go-lucky type of romance. Very easy to read (though the formatting was pretty rough on my Kindle), I finished it in about 2 hours. As a Northern Virginia/Washington, DC native and sports fan, I genuinely liked the DC area sports angle. I thought the main characters were decently developed and appreciated the scenery depictions. Without too many spoilers, the gist of the books is as follows:Cole is a famous badboy baseball player for the Washington Nationals whose contract renewal is at risk due to his party boy image. Meantime, a former acquaintance of his, the wholesome Liza, has won a date with him through a charity auction. Liza is a baseball fanatic due to her father bering a former MLB player and her parents being co-owners of the Orioles. In order to remedy his image, Cole's agent Frank, exploits Cole and Liza's first date to garner positive publicity for Cole's career and hopefully a contract renewal. Frank pushes Cole into the relationship and makes a shady deal with Liza to continue the relationship with the promise of a $500,000 donation to her charity. Liza and Cole go out on their first date and sparks fly. The press gets wind of it and the two continue the relationship. As the relationship grows, Cole and Liza face their own demons of the past, in the form of a deceased fiancee and confidence issues. Yet, both are warring internally over their respective deals with Frank. What begins as a farce of a relationship develops into genuine love.As I stated before, I liked the book!! But there were a few things I didn't like as well. Chiefly, there was no drama nor suspense. The story was also very slow to develop in the beginning. There was barely a blip of an argument. Well, at the end of the book Liza overhears Frank and Cole discussing their deal and gets angry, but because both Liza and Cole had made shady deals with Frank to endure a fake relationship, her anger was misplaced and they made up less than 2 days later. And the sex scenes were so vanilla that Cole and Liza's chemistry was unbelievable (I don't even think the author used the word cock, though I could be wrong). Lots of cake and cake pops were eaten, baseball metaphors were liberally sprinkled in, a random/comical "you are the father" Maury moment was tossed in, noticeably absent passionate love scenes, all topped off with a PG predictable happy-ending, made the Practice Proposal a bit too unrealistic, and saccharine for my usual tastes. There was no connection between the reader and the characters and there wasn't much intrigue. The more I thought about the plot, the more that I wished there was more depth to it. Alas, it was a harmless, well-written quickie read.