Review: Hazel eyes ROTFLMAO
Rating: 1 out of 5
Date: 01 5, 2012
A high-powered Nashville-based music talent manager with clients nominated in every Grammy category is publicly berated and accused of sexually harassing an underage intern she's never met by the minor's irate father. The businesswoman and the father then concoct a scheme for her to "date" the teenager until he tires of her, but their plan is complicated when the woman and the father fall in love with each other.Unintentionally hilarious as there is not a shred of credibility anywhere to be found and the writing is laugh-out-loud horrible. We're expected to believe this uber-successful executive, who would be more famous than Michael Ovitz by the way her achievements are described, and who would be handling rock stars and agents and lawyers and producers on a daily basis -- and by handling, I mean always getting what she wants from them, because that's her job -- just falls apart over this total stranger yelling at her in a restaurant and has no clue how to handle him? It's possible for someone to be cool in one situation and flummoxed in another, but we'd have to SEE it to believe it. We're TOLD by the main character something like, gee, I don't understand why I'm so good at what I do yet I can't figure out what to do here. We would need to see her doing her job to believe she's not a totally weak moron. The problem with that is, the author doesn't seem to have the first clue what a talent manager does. Then we'd need real obstacles preventing her from behaving like a rational person with that success dealing with people would. A person in her position would probably fire an intern for messing up a coffee order and would take swift, decisive legal action if accused of statutory rape by the father of an employee she didn't know existed. She goes along with the father's plan because this 17-year-old, who is delusionally crushing on her like a mildly retarded twelve-year-old, might possibly -- gasp -- run away and join a cult or commit suicide if she rejects him. Never occurs to them to sit the kid down and talk to him and introduce him to a little something called reality. In fact, we rarely see the boy anyway. Like the details of the main characters' jobs, we're just "told" how the "dating" scheme is playing out, rather than shown. It's also absurd to think that anyone could fall in love with the father. He has such a stupid hair-trigger mentality, constantly overreacting to every little thing, he shows all the early warning signs of a controlling, abusive domestic partner. When his son says he's in love with his boss, he takes that at face value and storms into a restaurant to confront her in a public scene. Once the real affair begins, he suspects her every business meeting as an opportunity for her to cheat on him. Even the dating scheme itself came out of the foregone conclusion he formed that his son would definitely carry out his childish "I'll run away from home" threat and will absolutely wind up a suicide statistic as a result if they don't DO SOMETHING!!! And, by the way, all these details come out in long dialogue conversations rather than in scenes that show these opinions forming.Which brings me to the writing. Most of the narrative action seems to be performed by the main character's disembodied hazel eyes. "Hazel eyes were jarred from their intense involvement with the pages of Variety." "Hazel eyes narrowed on the paper one last time." "Hazel eyes gleamed in awareness." "One hazel eye winked." "Hazel eyes flirted." "One hazel eye focused on the security peephole." "Hazel eyes glowed like polished agates." "Hazel eyes looking for answers in the artistic details on the plaster ceiling." "The hazel eyes that studied Quintin's proud features mirrored Stevie's own ambivalent feelings." "She lifted the cloth, one hazel eye opened to level an accusing stare." "Preoccupied hazel eyes looked at the woman who was more confidante-second mother than employee." "Hazel eyes never faltered in their direct gaze." And so on. For the record, since the owner of the hazel eyes is the viewpoint character, all these quotes take us out of viewpoint -- she can't see her own eyes.If you found this in the erotica section and were looking for titillation, that doesn't come in until a full 2/3 through the book. Ironically, the grammar problems mostly disappear once the characters start bumping and grinding. This actually begins precisely at the 50% mark on the Kindle file, but the story abruptly ends, with all the "problems" simply solving themselves, at the 74% mark, the rest of the book filled with a bunch of excerpts from other books, after a note from the author singing her own praises and claiming to have "4 million books in print" and 18 novels on "assorted bestseller lists." Scariest of all, she teaches writing.