Anexis Matos

Synopsis

A weekend getaway for positive press turns into more than best friends Tessa and Ryan expect.

Book Information

Genre: Romance
Category: Adult
Explicit sex: Yes
Explicit violence: No
Content warnings: None that I can see. I recommend doing your own research regarding this.

This is the fourth book in a series. It doesn’t seem like you have to read the first three to understand this story. This is great for me because I’ll only go back to read another book from this series for class or when hell freezes over.

Review

The prose is good. Accessible and easy to read. However, it wasn’t enough to keep me reading.

The pacing is terrible. Theoretically, I should enjoy it. I prefer slow pacing for most stories, but, for this one, it doesn’t work. It’s so slow that it’s boring. While things happen, it feels like nothing does.

One last thing I want to mention regarding the writing is that the book is too long for the story it’s trying to tell. We don’t get an inciting incident until about chapter seven. This is not necessarily bad, but everything before that is fluff. None of it is important to the rest of the story. I also found at least two chapters that can be cut, making the story at least 20 pages shorter. These point of views are not needed.

I rarely do this, but I’m putting characters and themes together. Because of the way the book is written, there’s no way to separate them.

The two tropes used in this story are miscommunication and friends to lovers. Both tropes are good. I follow BookTubers who hate the miscommunication trope, but I’m not one. No tropes are bad. No cliches are bad. Only execution is and that’s where the problem lies here.

The friendship between Tessa and Ryan is the biggest conflict regarding the romance. This is what fuels the miscommunication. As a reader, this doesn’t make much sense. If they’re friends, why is it so hard to fucking communicate? This feels forced and it lasts through the entire story. It’s exhausting. I have no doubt that this can work, but the author doesn’t give enough of a reason for me to care. The reason feels childish.

It doesn’t help that the characters are bland. Boring. An insult to characters. I hate them. They’re equally annoying and I can’t take them seriously.

The romance is a joke. Ryan starts noticing Tessa when she gets a makeover and became more feminine. He starts showing random signs of jealousy from the beginning of the book, but this is when he truly notices her. Her feelings are obvious, but his are forced.

Speaking of the makeover, I hate that scene. It’s one of the things that could have been cut out. It’s useless fluff. I also don’t like it because they change Tessa’s hair. It’s stated that she has curly hair and, after the makeover, she has wavy hair. While I cut my hair and don’t let it grow, I originally have curly hair. It’s very beautiful and there are ways to style it. This feels careless. It reads like her hair isn’t pretty in its original form. This makeover irritates me as someone who used to have long curly hair before I chose to cut it all off.

Conclusion

Overall, this is an interesting concept, but it fails in execution. It’s an insult to good tropes. To good romance. I hate that I had to read it. I rated it one star.

Author’s Note

Hey, everyone! Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoyed this review.

I started reading this book in Braille. I was kind of excited because the synopsis interested me and, the week before, I read Black Sheep Bargain. Coming out of a good book usually makes me want to pick up another one.

By chapter two, I was bored. I had to force myself to open the book on my eReader. I didn’t want to buy it on Audible, but, by chapter 10, I realized I couldn’t read it physically. It took so much energy.

I finished the last half of the book in one sitting. I changed my reading speed from 2.5 to 3.5, the highest one on Audible. 2.5 didn’t feel fast enough. It also didn’t help that I didn’t like the narrator.

I’m just glad my reading of this book is done. It can be erased from my memory.

No review next week. Instead, I have a story. I can’t wait for you to read it.

My review will be out on my channel in 2023. If you want to see it first, subscribe. I usually release videos on Wednesdays, Fridays, and Sundays at 5:00 AM Eastern Standard Time. That way, you have something to watch when you wake up. To get you started, here’s my Blind Reviews series.