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Love the Wednesday You're With
Aug. 25th, 2021 04:16 pmWhat I've Finished Reading
The Proposal is a light-as-air romance that I bought because of its wonderful/horrible starting premise, which is that Nik's douchey boyfriend proposes to her by Jumbtron at a Dodgers game (with her name misspelled), and she has to reject him in front of thousands of outraged fans. Luckily, a nice doctor named Carlos and his equally nice sister decide to rescue her from the approaching camera crew by pretending to be long-lost friends and hustling her out of there. They give her a ride home, Carlos and Nik hit it off, and there you go. The rest of the book huffs and puffs like an adorable toy steam engine trying to throw flimsy stumbling blocks in the way of Nik and Carlos living happily every after, but most of them don't even register. They are things like, "Nik doesn't want to get seriously involved so soon after a breakup" and "Carlos worries that Nik is too bourgie to appreciate his favorite taco place." Finally the flimsiest roadblock of all hits its mark and sends them hurtling into the Obligatory Late-Book Breakup.
( Very mild spoilers for a book with no surprises )
This is one of those interlocking shared-cast romance series books, which doesn't cause too many problems, but the attempt to "tie in" to books the reader may or may not have read is probably responsible for some of The Proposal's weirder and more pointless conversational cul-de-sacs. Nik's friendships are believable even if the dialogue and the overbearingly cute/convenient cupcake entrepeneurship isn't. Overall, this is good buttery corn: two likable people enjoy each other's company, survive an obligatory stupid conflict, and go right back to having a good time. It should also be noted that author Jasmine Guillory makes fun of people who use too many exclamation points not five pages after ending a sentence in the narration with four question marks. You can't have it both ways, Guillory! Except apparently you can.
What I'm Reading Now
Lent is a pleasant oddball of a novel by noted weirdo Jo Walton - it's less deliberately alienating than Among Others, which I loved, and less of a lecture on wheels than The Just City, which I couldn't get into. It begins with a demon infestation in fifteenth-century Florence, expels the demons so it can go be a regular historical novel for a few chapters, and is now easing gently back into demon city. I don't know where it's going exactly, but happy enough to take the ride.
The Proposal is a light-as-air romance that I bought because of its wonderful/horrible starting premise, which is that Nik's douchey boyfriend proposes to her by Jumbtron at a Dodgers game (with her name misspelled), and she has to reject him in front of thousands of outraged fans. Luckily, a nice doctor named Carlos and his equally nice sister decide to rescue her from the approaching camera crew by pretending to be long-lost friends and hustling her out of there. They give her a ride home, Carlos and Nik hit it off, and there you go. The rest of the book huffs and puffs like an adorable toy steam engine trying to throw flimsy stumbling blocks in the way of Nik and Carlos living happily every after, but most of them don't even register. They are things like, "Nik doesn't want to get seriously involved so soon after a breakup" and "Carlos worries that Nik is too bourgie to appreciate his favorite taco place." Finally the flimsiest roadblock of all hits its mark and sends them hurtling into the Obligatory Late-Book Breakup.
( Very mild spoilers for a book with no surprises )
This is one of those interlocking shared-cast romance series books, which doesn't cause too many problems, but the attempt to "tie in" to books the reader may or may not have read is probably responsible for some of The Proposal's weirder and more pointless conversational cul-de-sacs. Nik's friendships are believable even if the dialogue and the overbearingly cute/convenient cupcake entrepeneurship isn't. Overall, this is good buttery corn: two likable people enjoy each other's company, survive an obligatory stupid conflict, and go right back to having a good time. It should also be noted that author Jasmine Guillory makes fun of people who use too many exclamation points not five pages after ending a sentence in the narration with four question marks. You can't have it both ways, Guillory! Except apparently you can.
What I'm Reading Now
Lent is a pleasant oddball of a novel by noted weirdo Jo Walton - it's less deliberately alienating than Among Others, which I loved, and less of a lecture on wheels than The Just City, which I couldn't get into. It begins with a demon infestation in fifteenth-century Florence, expels the demons so it can go be a regular historical novel for a few chapters, and is now easing gently back into demon city. I don't know where it's going exactly, but happy enough to take the ride.
