First Comes Revenge

         I’m not even sure where to start with this one.  My Indiana Romance Book Club decided on this one for January 2024, and since it was readily available from Kindle Unlimited, I was able to get started on it right away (versus having to place a hold at my library or order it and wait patiently…ish).  I wanted to like this, I really did, but there was a clue it wasn’t going to be “great” before I even started: it was self-published.  It’s entirely possible that Penelope Bloom never shopped her book out, but that’s pretty unlikely, which means that publishers weren’t interested.  While I’ve never tried to published a book, I have read thousands of them, and in my experience, the self-published books weren’t picked up by publishers for a reason.

            Reason #1: The writing itself is pretty elementary.  While that allows for a very easy to read novel, it also makes for sentence structures that are as basic as they get.  My times while reading this book I found two small (sometimes even more) sentences that could have been combined to form more complex sentences that would have made the flow of the words more fluid.  Instead, this reads like a drumline cadence played by elementary school beginners, it’s pretty choppy. 

            Reason #2: Again, more problematic writing, but less structure-based.  I have had multiple people ask me to read chapters they’ve written, and the fundamental problem I find is that what might sound good in your head won’t necessarily translate well into printed form.  And as the author, you might reread what you’ve written and think it reads exactly like you’d want it to, but that’s because you know the vocal tone you’re attempting to project, your reader does not.  This entire book comes across with that problem.  Bloom knows how she wants us to interpret her words because she wrote them.  As the reader, I frequently had to wonder why she chose to put a punctuation mark here, or a certain phrase there.  I also found her use of colorful metaphors unnecessary.  It felt like she noticed that she hadn’t thrown in a bad word in a paragraph so she randomly threw one in.  It felt forced and not at all organic.  Again, it’s choppy didn’t allow the story to truly flow well. 

            Reason #3:  The obnoxious use of literary (and societal) tropes.  Charli’s brother is the prime example of a stereotypical protective brother and it made for a great big eye-roll.  I have four brothers, none of them are overprotective.  Charli has a gaggle of jilted friends, all suffering from equally miserable breakup stories.  That storyline is also overdone.  Jameson’s best friend has a “bros before hoes” attitude. In my experience, when a man becomes smitten, he puts his friends on a backburner, so that particular stereotype is also unrealistic.  Jameson has his own gaggle of women with his sisters, but in their case, they’re doing everything to help him win back the woman he thinks he loves.  This trope is the only one I can get behind.  If you need help to woo a woman, please ask a woman for help. 

            Reason #3: I admit that my current husband and I got pretty serious pretty quickly, but the speed with which Jameson decided that Charlie was “the one,” was just ridiculous and that storyline is vastly abused in the romance genre.  The story would have benefitted had Bloom allowed for a more realistic relationship development. 

            Reason #4: The age gap.  I just couldn’t get behind a 13-year age difference.  Jameson is reaching the border of middle-age while Chali is barely emerging from puberty.  Jameson was a seventh grader when Charli was born…James on was starting puberty when Charli was wearing diapers.  Jameson was old enough to legally babysit Charli (in most states) when Charli made her entrance into the world.  That’s just a whole lot of ew. 

            Every book I read gets a single star simply for existing because writing is hard and deserves at least one gold star.  This one did earn two, so it’s not the dumpster fire I might have made it seem.  I wanted to finish it because I wanted to know how the story played out.  There have been many books that I never finished because I just didn’t care about the story, that was not the case here.  I did care about this story and I did want to find out how it ended.  Bloom was able to make me a bit of a cheerleader for this relationship, despite the icky age-gap. I wanted Charli to get her book published!  In the end I was still pretty disappointed, but at least I finished it.