AUTHOR: Christie Walker Bos
PUBLISHER: Cerridwen Press
LENGTH: Novel (roughly 96k)
GENRE: Contemporary romance
COST: $6.49
Jessica Singer is a successful advertising executive by day and frustrated writer at night. In an attempt to pursue her dream, she enrolls in an online creative course at UCLA. Her virtual teacher turns out to be the gorgeous Professor Brant Wilson, but all her attempts to meet him in the flesh fail. Determined to meet the man who has sparked her creativity, she seeks him out, but the reality of him is nothing like the fantasy she’s constructed. It’s up to Jessica to then decide which is better.
I’m a sucker for Internet romances. Maybe because I haven’t read a thousand of them, I don’t know. But something about the anonymous coming together in a surprising way always makes me sit up and take notice. Since the premise of this book was about an online, nontraditional student interested in her virtual professor, I jumped on it. But the excerpt I read didn’t quite prepare me for the reality of what the heroine was going to do.
She stalks him. Plain and simple. She even jokingly admits to it when she meets him. She lies in an attempt to get personal information, and when that isn’t enough, stakes out the man’s known living area and mailbox. Repeatedly. And follows a girl home who is taking him his mail. This is a highly successful professional woman in her mid-to-late thirties I’m talking about here, but honestly, as I was reading this, I kept wanting to shake her and scream, “You’re not still in high school!” To make it worse, when the man who’s interested in her at work happens to know what kind of drink she prefers, she gets all outraged. Like she hasn’t done far worse in attempting to find her professor. Is this hypocritical or what?
Maybe if there had been some actual build-up detailing her growing fascination with her professor, I wouldn’t have been so riled up by it. But there wasn’t. She talks about what a great connection they have during the class chats, but the reader never gets to see it. We just get to hear about it after the fact, or get a short paragraph summarizing. Nope. Doesn’t cut it for me. If a woman old enough to know better is going to be driven to stalking in this day and age, she better have a damn good reason for it, and for me, this book never gave it.
That was a next-to-impossible hurdle for me to overcome in reading this book. Any investment I had in the story at all was due to Brant, the story’s solid hero, but he wasn’t nearly enough to cover the story’s flaws for me. Though it’s not apparent in the excerpt provided on the site, the author is a headhopper, which I hate. But the thing of it is, she doesn’t even do it consistently. She’ll go through long sections with only one perspective, then all of a sudden, it’s hopping back and forth between Brant and Jessica, paragraph to paragraph. Once, I even caught it hopping within the same paragraph. It’s very disconcerting for me. Some people like it, and that’s okay. I don’t. If this is indicative of the author’s style, I can’t say I’m going to be standing in line to buy any more of her books.
| Readability | 4/10 – Uneven pacing, clunky exposition drops, and head hopping can’t compensate for few errors in the text. |
| Heroine | 3/10 – Stalking does not a likable heroine make. Points for a believable professional, though. |
| Hero | 7/10 – Far more likable than the heroine, it felt like the author was more concerned about making her tortured hero more real than the heroine |
| Entertainment value | 4/10 – I was too busy rolling my eyes at the heroine to enjoy the story. |
| World building | 7/10 – Satisfactory. At least I understood what the heroine’s world was like, and the extent of the hero’s condition |
| TOTAL: | 25/50 |
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