#amreadingromance

A Fashionable Deception: A Contemporary M/M Steamy Romance Novella

*COVER REVEAL* 5/28/2024

If you like my fics, you might enjoy my fun, KinnPorsche inspired original, A Fashionable Deception:

💜Grump Daddy meets Sunshine Chaos Demon 💜Family issues become romance issues 💜Fake dating, but make it Latine 💜Paris Fashion Week or bust 💜“Milo-High Club”

Real estate agents will tell you that location is everything when choosing a home. Readers are a little more forgiving thankfully! I know many of you like stories set on ranches or the Pacific Northwest. I took a risk to set my new series in Florida and places like Miami and the Everglades and hope you’ve been enjoying those locations in the South Beach Security series. But that made me think…

My new gay romance book Symphony for Connor is now available on Amazon and Smashwords!!!😘🌈🎉

“David falls in love with Connor—a man in every way his opposite—but he can't stay away, no matter how toxic this relationship becomes.”

Check it out here: http://www.deepdesirespress.com/symphony-for-connor/

“Mo’ lockdown, mo’ reading time” August reading wrap-up! And a new category marker [RR] for titles that were re-reads. (There were a few, I needed the comfort of a pre-loved world and characters.) .

🐂A Doctor for the Cowboy @amyandrewsbooks

🔥🔱A Promise of Fire, Breathe of Fire, Heart on Fire @amandabouchetauthor [RR]

🏕Get a Life, Chloe Brown @taliahibbert

🧘‍♀️Incense and Sensibility @sonali.dev

🗡Kiss of a Demon King @kresleycole

🥃Love and Rum @dmc_lean

👜Loving Lizzie March @susannah.hardy

🌉Neon Gods @katee_robert

🐭🦖Rock Hard @authornalinisingh [RR]

🎭📺The Austen Playbook, Headliners @lucyparkerauthor

👀The Eyes of Tamburah @mariavsnyderwrites

🏈The Hook Up @kristen_callihan

A review of Undercover Bromance by Lyssa Kay Adams

 Let me start off by saying that this book has an instance of what clearly seems like sexual assault, wrapped up in a gloss of romance. Skip down to the “The Unforgivable” section for that information.

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Normally, I don’t rate and review any books that I read for fear of poisoning the memory well. Normally, I wouldn’t rate and review a romance novel in particular, because it isn’t a genre with which I have much experience, nor is it one I have much love for. But the title and the fact that it showed up on a list of good romance novels for men from a source I trust made me pick it up in the first place. I’ve been trying to get deeper into the Writing Community online, and so many writers there are romance authors – and romance is such a popular genre generally – that I wanted to familiarize myself with the genre as I work on my own writing...

I’m making an exception to rating and reviewing this book because there were some truly, deeply problematic things going on here, on top of the bad/schlocky writing, and the gross descriptions so prevalent in my mind’s limited knowledge of what’s bad in the romance genre. So, in the following review I’m going to justify my one star rating of this book by describing The Gross [broadly, the terribly stomach-turning descriptions, characters, and plot points in this book], The Bad [the technical problems – especially in the plot], and The Unforgivable [the glossed-over sexual assault].

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The Gross:

I’m going to jump right in on the most obvious issue I have with (my own idea of) romance novels: the sex scenes. But this isn’t going to be what you think it is; I am not a prude. Nothing turns my stomach faster than euphemistic language about body parts. “Her sex” is bad enough. This book also talked about running his fingers along “her slit.” But the description that almost made me hurl was “her pink bits.” Nope. Vomit. Say vulva. There is nothing gross about that word. A good sex scene is hard to write, and you don’t need to go full-on erotica (though honestly, I think hardcore erotica is far more enjoyable to read, more real, and sexier than the euphemistic stuff), but why have a very descriptive scene only to censor over the words everybody is paying their good money to read? Pick a lane. Give me actual adult sexual content, or have everything fade to black. Please?

I looked at a bunch of the reviews of this book, astounded as I was that it was so highly rated. Where language was used as a fault, the line “my vagina senses are tingling” was often cited. Cited as gross and crass. Sorry, this was a line I found truly funny and endearing, used as it was by a female character who was grossed out by the villain of the story, a serial sexual predator. To me, it was a great Spiderman reference, and an honest thing for a woman to say. I’ve heard such comments from female friends before. Seeing this comment from the romance reading community really saddens me, because not liking an honest use of body parts, but championing “pink parts” is only fueling the female body shaming that is so prevalent in our society.

“Now if you’ll excuse us, we have a happy ever after to start” is the line that ends the bulk of the novel, before the epilogue. Once you’ve scraped the vomit out of your mouth, there’s also the ending of the epilogue, where after the main character “proposes” off-handedly on the couch, they have sex, and then he asks her if that was a yes, and she confirms it, the narration says, “after she said yes he did things that made her say it a whole bunch of times naked.” Then they fist-bumped. End of novel. Yeah… Did I mention they’d only known each other for a little more than six months at this point? Yea, I think that’s kind of fast…

But romance novels are stereotypically bad in this department according to me, who knows little to nothing about them. What other gross stuff happened in this book? Let’s start with the male lead, Mack, who winks at everything in a skirt. There are paragraphs where he literally winks at the woman he’s talking to three times within said paragraph. She’s always super charmed. This is supposed to be endearing behavior. Then there are a whole chapter where the sex the characters are having is compared to the national anthem – wanting to sing it, wanting to wave a flag, saluting this with that appendage. Barf barf barf.

I could go on, but this book isn’t for me, really. I’ll just close with a line I really did like from the book: “Smells like a camel exhibit in here.” This line is said by the bros when they come in to rescue Mack from his depression on losing the girl, and they find him in squalor. This book could broadly be described as smelling like a camel exhibit.

 The Bad:

The biggest plot error I found in this book happened near the end. A group of the team is running to meet the “inside guy” who will distribute the dossier on the villain to the press as they march in to his book launch. They get there to find their inside guy knocked out, and another security guy holding the dossiers they were literally carrying to the meeting (he knocked him out to take them away, even though he didn’t know what was in them – not to mention that they weren’t actually there in the first place). Terrible editing!

There are other things – characters switching their mind on something deeply held from paragraph to paragraph, a convoluted plan to expose the sexual predator at his own event, and thinking that’s the only way to take the guy down, when in real life a reporter will take information at any time, not just when tricked into it. But it is the real lack of understanding of the human character that really bugged me.

The secret that Mack is carrying with him is that his father was abusive and murdered somebody, and is in jail. Mack changed his name out of embarrassment, and lies and tells people his father is dead. He is made into the villain towards the end of the book, because he “lied” to Liv, his love interest, about this. They had known each other for some time longer than a week and shorter than a month. They were not dating (she was adamant about that), and had slept together just twice. But he was a liar now, because he had a “secret identity” and lied about his father. People just accepted that that was a terrible thing to do. No! If that’s your past, it is yours, and you don’t owe that information to anybody that early in a relationship. Sure, you need to own up to it before you talk marriage, but not before you’ve started dating. This doesn’t have anything to do with his character, but his father’s. Shaming him for “not being honest” and having him have to come to terms with it, and be open about it publically, is just *not* something that he has to do. Weird morality here. I know it was stretched to add drama, but I think it does a disservice to his great trauma in life.

I don’t believe a group of people should take matters into their own hands to investigate a person on sexual harassment on behalf of other women. I don’t think they need to use their friend’s van (literally an FBI-style surveillance van that nobody seems to think it is weird that a friend just has – a van that never plays an important role except that it doesn’t drive fast). I also don’t think a former cop is going to play along in a game of entrapment with a bunch of youngsters out for the thrill of taking down a celebrity chef. I especially don’t think people are going to trust the “inside guy” who is the security guard for the big bad. There is absolutely nothing that any characters do (aside from taping the bad guy) that moves the plot forward. It is all them falling into luck or information that others provide. Everything happens to them. This is just not the makings of a well-written book.

The characters were also so bland and uniform, with the exception of “The Russian” who was all caricature and comic relief, and whose lactose intolerance goes into play when they almost got caught because of the smell of his fart while they were hiding. Hilarious? No. So juvenile. And also, it was from vegan cheese, which the author says “is still cheese” and thus causes him the same problem as cheese. Speaking as a chef, that’s not how lactose intolerance works.

And, can I quickly gripe about the fact that the tech whiz who can break into a computer in 2 minutes, take out the contents of said computer in 30 seconds, breaks down all the banking info in an hour to tie the sexual predator to dozens of victims financially, also says he will be unable to edit a video (literally cut it off at all), in the hour they have during a drive, so by showing the big bad to be the big bad, they will also expose Mack’s terrible history and show him too to be a liar? Remember, this is literally exposing that his dad was a bad guy… again, not seeing the problem for Mack (as if that would kill his reputation)… but also: press stop on the tape? In an hour I, a complete novice, could learn to edit video enough to be able to stop a video when I wanted it to stop. The drama was unnecessary, and the mechanism to achieve it is so utterly stupid.

I also don’t love the fact that it takes a group of men to save women who were the victims of sexual assault. I also don’t love the message that women have to be a certain way when it comes to coming forward (even though they try to say otherwise, it was very moralistic against anybody being quiet). I very much don’t love the fact that they called the sexual predator – who honestly had unwanted, forced sexual relations with many women – a mere “sexual harasser.”

 The Unforgiveable:

Let’s talk about consent. The second time the main characters have sex, Liv expressly says ‘hey, I haven’t given you consent to have sex again.’ He then says that fingering her isn’t sex. Then proceeds to finger her. Then grabs her, carries her to a bed insider her own house, and then has sex with her. Without actually obtaining consent. This isn’t even an instance of tacit consent, because both parties are acting in a certain way and advancing the same act. She literally denied him consent by saying he didn’t have it, and that was never cleared up. Even if she never said no again, that’s pretty terrible for him to just assume.

Also: this happened immediately after he just shows up at her house. They had had sex once. She said she’d call after 3 days. He comes over after two, not calling specifically because he said that she’d have probably said no to his coming over. It was dark, she thought he was an intruder. She hit him with a shoe. She has to apologize to him for hitting him, and clean him up. Hey. In my mind, this dude is a psycho at this point. If you don’t buy into the 3 days before a call, fine. But then you pick up the phone. Don’t just show up at a near-stranger’s house. Don’t do it at night. Don’t sneak up the stairs. And don’t get mad when she’d mad because you acted like a psycho. And then most certainly, listen to her when she says that you don’t have consent to have sex with her again, and go on fingering her immediately thereafter.

 This book is bad on a lot of levels, but the sexual assault scene tarted up to look romantic just made me seethe inside, especially because this whole book attempted to be a “bros don’t let bros sexually assault women” morality tale.