Emma Hart

"When Poppy needs a date for her sister's wedding she finds the perfect one - only she doesn't even know his last name." --

Four Day Fling

Emma Hart (Fiction writer)

A standalone romantic comedy of epically awkward proportions, from New York Times bestselling author, Emma Hart.Imagine this.You're ready to leave after a one-night stand, and you're figuring out how to--shock horror--leave your number and ask him to be your fake boyfriend for your sister's wedding this weekend.When he wakes up.Well, that happened to me. And over coffee and omelets, I found myself a date.Which was how I ended up arriving at the wedding with a guy I knew nothing about.I didn't know his last name, or how we met, or how long we'd been dating. I didn't know where he grew up, what he'd majored in in college, or how many siblings he had.I sure as hell didn't know he was Adam Winters, hotshot hockey player--and not only my father's favorite player, but my little nephew's freakin' idol. Which means I'm in trouble. Big, big trouble. My mother is suspicious, my sister is bridezilla on crack, and my grandpa will tell anyone who'll listen about his time in Amsterdam's Red Light District. Four days.I have to keep this up for four days, and then Adam and I can return to our regular lives, where we don't have sex whenever we're alone and my family aren't interrogating him over his intentions with me.At least, that's the plan.And we all know what happens to those.

Colleen

1 Star
 
*Well… (crickets chirping)… that sucked.*
 
Heads up: this review has some swearing and vulgarity – straight from the book, btw.


Every once in a while I get the crazy idea to read something fun and flirty and sexy. The problem is that my definition of “fun and flirty and sexy” seems to vary greatly from other people’s definition. And then I remember why I don’t read these types of books more often.

Four Day Fling is the story of Poppy, who invites her one night stand to be her pretend boyfriend / date to her sister’s wedding in order to get her family to stop bugging her about being single. The fake relationship to real relationship troupe can be fun sometimes, but this book had way too many factors against it.

The story is told in first person (an annoyance) mostly from Poppy’s POV (an even bigger annoyance because she is awful). There are a couple of random chapters told from Adam, probably added to give the reader a break from the torture of reading things from Poppy’s voice.

This was supposed to a humorous story. Instead, I alternated between pity and disgust for Poppy and her family. The wedding shenanigans were hugely disappointing. I could pick any random wedding from my family and give you far more zany stories than what Hart concocted. Her version was centered around people being nasty to each other. And Poppy was the nastiest person there – despite some rather half-hearted attempts to say she was the glue that held her family together, she was soooo special, she was a good person beneath that tough exterior, etc., etc., barf, barf.

There isn’t much to the plot beyond the obvious troupe of fake-to-real relationship and wedding drama. You can probably guess the whole thing just from the synopsis. There is also something of a twist involving someone being a celebrity. Since I don’t give a damn about celebrities (real or fake), reading about people fawning over a fake celebrity was painfully tedious.

But not as tedious as Poppy herself. She seems determined to win the TSTL awards. She is lazy, irresponsible, and disgustingly vulgar. She is clumsy and incompetent yet totally unaware of how (allegedly) gorgeous and sexy she is. She is also undeniably a total bitch. She says so herself, and then she spends every moments living up to the declaration.


   “Let’s face it. I didn’t trust women. Women were bitches. And, since I was a woman, I had that fact on very good authority.” 

Hart falls into the “tell instead of show” trap. And sadly, where that is most evident is the sex scenes. There is a complete lack of sexiness in Four Day Fling. There was no believable chemistry between the main characters. They both talk about how “fucking sexy” each other are and how mind-blowing the sex is, but there is nothing believable about it. There actually wasn’t much sex in this book. The characters spent tons of time talking about how amazing their intercourse was but not much time actually doing anything. The little sex that was on page was monumentally disappointing. Like this gem:


  “’Can you bring me a towel?’
I looked over my shoulder at Adam. ‘Sure. You’re the one who needs a towel. That’s a bucketful of cum you’ve got inside you.’
‘I had it,’ he said nonchalantly. ‘Now you’ve got it.’”

Yeah, try to contain yourself after reading that steamy sexiness. (*She says with sarcasm and revulsion.)

I don’t understand how Hart is a best-selling author. This read like something self-published on the internet. There was a total lack of editing in this book including the author forgetting her main character’s last name and changing it! The dialogue was painful. And most of the writing relied on swearing to get things across. Now, I swear plenty, and I’m not one of those obsessed people trying to censor anything they dislike. But the profanity in this book was excessive to the extreme. In a 297 page book, the word “fuck” is used 99 times! And that doesn’t include the other swearwords frequently used.

But the real nail in the coffin was that by halfway through Four Day Fling, my brain was sending off major signals that I’d read an almost identical story before. I was starting to wonder if plagiarism suits were in order when I looked back through my Goodreads to find which book it was… The book was Being Brooke and low and behold, it is by the same author. As bad as plagiarism is, I almost think it is worse when an author is so completely unoriginal that they just rewrite their same story with minor details. These two books are alarmingly similar right down to the incompetent heroine suddenly revealing a near-savant level hidden talent. This is the same characters with different names. All of the problems with Being Brooke were present in Four Day Fling only it was so much worse because the author clearly learned nothing. What a hack. I wouldn’t recommend this book to anyone. And hopefully I never had the misfortune to read anything by Emma Hart ever again!! 


Note to self: try harder to remember the names of authors you don’t like, so that you can better avoid them!


RATING FACTORS:
Ease of Reading: 2 Stars
Writing Style: 1 Star
Characters and Character Development: 1 Star
Plot Structure and Development: 1 Star
Level of Captivation: 1 Star
Originality: 1 Star

Four Day Fling

Reviews