Review: It's the Simple Moments
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 01 31, 2014
Strictly Professional was a great read for me. I finished it quickly because the writing was smooth and effortless, and the characters immediately engaging and likable. This was not a shock-and-awe romance, it was a slice of two lives, intersecting--the right man, the right woman, at the right time.Gabi's got a problem. She has an ambition to pursue a career as a lawyer and her parents and ex-boyfriend believe she should instead become a trophy wife. Desperate to escape them, she moves to Atlanta, determined to become independent and self-determining. On one of her first nights in her new home, she goes out with her roommate and meets Terrence. Their attraction is instantaneous and intense, and but for said roommate, that first meeting would have more likely than not resulted in more than one interrupted kiss.Terrence is, like Gabi, very career-focused and not at all interested in a relationship and though he finds this new woman he met during a night out with his best friend interesting, he's not on the market for anything smelling like permanence. And so he doesn't call.But as Fate would have it, Terrence and Gabi are destined not only to meet again, but to be forced to work closely together. Very, very closely.I loved this writer's attention to the slow progression of a relationship from attraction, to admiration and respect, to friendship and finally to love. She detailed the little moments that make a couple a couple so well that I found myself yelling, "Kiss her, dammit!" or "Tell him you like him!" even as I delighted in the fact that their inability to do so was exactly like real life. The stories, moments and experiences that Gabi and Terrence shared were spot-on for how relationships happen, and I LOVED every moment. You could tell as you read their story that this writer was more interested in the "relationship" than the 'sparks' or 'passion'. No gratuitous sex, no raunchy encounters, just a man and woman, drawing ever closer to each other, fighting it every inch of the way.What made this a four-star rather than five-star read for me was the portrayal of Gabi's parents and ex-boyfriend, Michael. These were three people who among them did not have ONE SINGLE redeeming quality. All of them were very plainly bad people. And my problem was that I don't believe there are any people who are that completely irredeemable. Particularly Gabi's parents who seemed willing to trade their daughter's happiness and even personal safety for status and appearances. I would have liked to see some indication that they were all more than a means to provide the obstacle to Gabi and Terrence's relationship. Where this author was incredibly successful with the two main characters, she lost steam with some of the secondaries.I say some, because Gabi and Terrence's friends were all very well-defined and had distinct personalities that make you want to know them better. Only the villains were thinly-drawn. Clearly this writer has the talent to pull off multi-dimensional characters, so I would have loved to see it in the people we don't root for as much as we saw it in the people we did root for.At the end of the day, however, I did enjoy this book and was intrigued by the teaser at the end for the follow-up to Strictly Professional, which offers tantalizing clues about where Terrence and Gabi end up. I'll be looking out for it for sure, and you should too, but first, read this one.