Lisa Phone

Frustrating

Revisado: 05-16-24

The narrators are excellent. Very good.

The overriding issue I have is that the writing for the female main character is frustrating as heck. She doesn't communicate -- not with the hero and not with the reader. From the start we know that she is angry with him. She's waited until she "hates" him before bringing things to a head by asking for a divorce. And, when she does ask for the divorce, she's like "there's no way to salvage this! I hate you now!" She isn't interested in trying to repair the relationship... which, okay, fine.

But it is SIX HOURS into the story before she explains anything about why she feels this way.

By that point, I as a reader was frustrated with her, (Also the ongoing pettiness of her punishments of the male main character became annoying. Taking out her frustrations in an overlong series of punishments started to come off as a toxic trait resulting from her family history)

Even when the story FINALLY gets around to having the female main character begin to communicate, it still seems like it's all taking care of her trauma but never giving the male character a fraction of the same grace. He apparently supports her through multiple traumas for a decade where her reflexive trait is to shut down and avoid him...but she finds 6 months of his doing the same thing, dealing with loss, just too painful -- for her.

I hate feeling that I'm siding against the heroine. That's just so typical. Everyone always seems to side against the woman in these situations. But the writing does the character few favors. It shouldn't have taken 6 hours before the story began even attempting to try to balance things or have her communicate with the reader (or her husband).

That's a writing issue.

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Immature characters

Revisado: 10-19-21

Narration is fine. Story keeps interest, but, oh my, the characters are immature. They compete rather than relate. Heroine spends most of the book mortifyingly desperate to marry a guy she barely knows and who pays her virtually no attention.

Her father is so dismissive it seems like emotional abuse and it’s not really resolved. Honestly when she she needs to stop relating to her family until they treat her with some caring and respect.

Meanwhile the hero and heroine manage to take their competition into significant property damage.

They needed to do more talking and less competing.

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Not Enough Grovel

Revisado: 07-15-21

The narrator does a good job with everything but the secondary character who is supposed to have a British accent. The accent isn't great. But for everything else she's fine.

As far as the story, I frequently like this author but this may be my least favorite of her books. I actually stalled out on listening to the book for a few weeks. For the first portion of the book the heroine was extremely childish (that said, it was flashbacks where she was in her late teens to about 22 so this is a forgivable thing. The heroine matures as the book progresses). As far as the hero goes, I don't think he did enough to earn a happy ending with the heroine. He was resentful, disrespectful, and really never gave her any priority in his life. He always -- ALWAYS -- prioritized his plans and his wants over her. I needed there to be a grovel where he realized that he was always looking for her to concede to his plans. I was honestly fearing that the story might end with her deciding to give in to his plans without his ever considering her needs or what was good for her. Still not sure that he ever considered what was good for her.

The story isn't bad. But I didn't find the pairing satisfying. I needed the hero to be... more.

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Good but ending is muted

Revisado: 06-24-21

Interesting story. Interesting characters. Excellent narration. However, the ending feels…too muted. It also felt like too much took place off screen, as it were.

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I lost track

Revisado: 07-31-20

Okay, the narrator did an amazing job with the voice of a character with cerebral palsy. She deserves credit.

The story, however careened off the rails.

The abusive parent did a 180 being insta redeemed by a single church service and some...I don’t know, a spectral visitation? Beats me. Whatever it was, it was neither convincing, earned, or coherent.

I also could never pin down what the timeline was

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The writing is fine, the plot is okay, but I hated the hero

Revisado: 03-23-19

The narrator is good. The writing is fine. The thing I could not overcome was the hero.

I hated him.

He’s a selfish, self-hating whiney brat.

He whines about how he was hurt so badly...because he was so out of control that he bet his entire fortune and ancestral home in a game. Then he spent years plotting revenge—a revenge that apparently requires betraying his two closest childhood friends.

I tried figuring out the timeline, and it seems like he stopped being anyone’s friend long before he lost everything on a bet. So he apparently was a darn crappy friend even before the ‘great tragedy’ ...that he brought on himself.

For his ‘revenge’ against a third party he’s willing to destroy a man who was a childhood playmate...after he abducts, strips half-naked, then ‘ruins’ his female childhood best friend for her dowry. He spanks her, marries her for her dowry, then ignores her. Seriously, I’m not sure how he’s supposed to be better than the villain in the book. Arguably, he’s worse than the villain. The villain egged on someone stupid enough to bet everything he knows on a game of chance. The ‘hero’ is willing to backstab and harm people who have been his friends for revenge against someone else.

And for all of his whining that it was about his ancestral home, he never even visits it after getting it back. There’s no effort to see to its tenants, no effort to rescue the land, no hint of even thinking about fixing the house. He stays in London loving his gaming hell.

I can only conclude the whole mess was solely about his ego.

How the heroine constantly forgave him became a head scratcher. Sure she would get angry, but she always forgave if he just paid attention to her for three minutes straight.

I’ve loved some books by this author, and will read other books written by her. I like her work. But I really hated this hero. He was an overgrown brat.

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It didn’t pursue its hook

Revisado: 02-01-18

I feel like there was a bait and switch somewhere. The blurb implies that the hero was in some true love relationship and that’s the obstacle for the new relationship. That is not the way the story plays out. That old relationship barely registers in the story other than the stereotypical ‘alpha male broods about the woman who ‘wronged him.’ What’s worse is that as the story goes along it just feels like the hero is super controlling. Creepily controlling. And he flies into rages if the woman doesn’t do what he says when he says it — relationship-wise and sexually. Frankly, he raises some red flags.

Another problem with abandoning the story hook is that it abandons a pretense of a plot beyond drama and hissyfit from the heroine’s sister and the ‘hero’ respectively. It got to the point that the sex scenes got boring because they began to feel like they were placed in the story because there simply wasn’t much of a plot.

So in short - hero with ragey control issues, doesn’t really pursue the blurb’s hook, not a lot of plot. And whatever other reviewer said the male narrator sounded like Batman was both hilarious and accurate.

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Excellent narration. Good story. Average romance.

Revisado: 03-04-16

Balogh always has interesting prose and it is good here. And the book works well as a dissection of rape culture and slut shaming while exposing issues with the romantic alphahole protagonist. The hero learns through the course of the novel that no means no. And has his eyes opened (to a degree) about the male privilege he's swimming within. So, on that front the book is interesting. It's good in dealing with issues of sexism and rape culture. On the romantic front, it is somewhat ho-hum on the romance front. I'm not sure it could be otherwise since clearly one of the aims of the novel was to highlight the issues of a man swimming in a sexist culture that thinks women are 'teases' or 'prudes' and that flirtation must always meet his ends. He learns (a bit) over the novel so there's progression but it makes a bit of a tough slog to root for him through much of the novel. The poor heroine in the other hand more than deserves a happy ending, so there's that.

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esto le resultó útil a 8 personas

Heroine is apparently supposed to be spectacular because the author tells us so *constantly*

Revisado: 01-14-16

Has a chick-lit quality that I can't quite pin down but reminds me a bit of Meg Cabot. Lots of tell rather than show about the heroine's prowess as spy. She's apparently an amazing spy...despite barely accomplishing anything in the meandering progress around Portugal and having no impact on the denouement of the plot (which would have resulted in the same general way even without the heroine's involvement). She is also apparently only a spy as a hobby of sorts financed by someone else entirely. The hero's Indian background is interesting though undeveloped. And the modern part of the story is ridiculous, annoying, and rather pointless.

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Fun and likable

Revisado: 01-14-16

The hero is amusing.
The pairing is likable.

The lingering overall impression was that the story was quite fun.

No issues with the narrator.

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