Review: I got it all, read it all, and I'm soooo disappointed
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 05 1, 2014
The synopsis for Taming Alex sounded intriguing, but unfortunately that was not the book Jill Sanders wrote."Alexis has always been the wild child." Really? You'd never know it from this book. The wildest thing we are told about is that she stole a little horsie figurine when she was 7 and paid a 7-yr-old Grant a kiss to keep quiet about it. Then at 17, she got a steady job and dated the same guy for 8 years. Oh my, how shocking."She’s the girl everyone always gossips about behind her back." Okay, if you say so, but again, we are never given any reason for this. She's a responsible working girl with a cheating boyfriend, but that gossip would be more about him, now wouldn't it?"Now that she's engaged to the town’s bad boy, Travis, she finally thinks she's heading in the right direction." I think Sanders has even less idea what a "bad boy" is than a "wild child." Travis is a drunken, cheating, jerk. I don't think that's quite the definition of "bad boy.""Then life throws a tall, dark, and good man her way and causes her whole world to shake." Only if you're talking about constant sex."after stepping in and helping the town's bad girl out one night," Again, not so bad." he [Grant] starts to see below Alexis' act. Now all he needs to do is convince her that choosing a good guy is not always a bad thing."  "Convince" implies that this is going to be tough. It's not--at least through most of the book. Yes, she stupidly turns away from him for awhile toward the end, but even then, it doesn't take that much convincing to get her back.Okay, so the book doesn't match the synopsis. I'm over that. What's right about Taming Alex? Well, it has a great cover. And I was surprised by who the real villain was, but that villain was written so badly and so unrealistically, that that surprise was quickly tarnished.With a long list of books to her credit, I was expecting way better writing. The writing here is average at its best moments, and really awful at its worst. (I was laughing out loud at how unrealistic the villain's thoughts were and at the end reveal--note to all authors: if you've never been a villain, don't try to get in their head, it just comes off as ridiculous)Alex mentions on occasion that she and Grant can't have a long-term relationship, because he is so "pure." Again, Ms. Sanders needs to get out her dictionary. While Grant is a nice guy--an honest guy--a hard-working guy, "Pure" would not be in the list. He kisses her about 15 minutes after he thinks she has broken up with her fiance, and on their next encounter, he's in her pants.The story is pretty much just a throw-away. There's nothing here that would make me want to re-read it. Aside from his rather fast ways, I liked Grant, although I didn't believe for a minute that he was only 25. Alex's character was all over the map. We're supposed to think of her as wild, but she is actually very responsible. Sanders wants us to believe that she blames herself for her parents' deaths and fears she'll hurt Grant somehow, but this attitude only pops out randomly.Another oddity is the secret marriage that her older sister had with Grant's friend Chase for 7years that somehow erased all the debt their father left them. There's no explanation for this, and this secret added nothing to the story. I found it baffling. And the part where Grant's ex-girlfriend shows up seemed to be just filler. I though we'd see more of this obsessive female later, but nope. She made one appearance and then disappeared.There are really two prologues: one when Alex was 7 and one when she was 17. The first one was cute and was a good set-up for the story (at least as purported by the synopsis). The second was unnecessary, and could easily have been referred back to in her thoughts.I also thought the gossip aspect of this story was overdone. Yes, there is gossip in small towns. I grew up in a gossipy small town. But for every little thing they say and do to be all over town within minutes was just borderline absurd.There just wasn't much that rang true in this book, and I'm wishing I hadn't even spent the .99 that I did. One good thing--I renewed my vow to never buy a book without reading a sample.