Three strikes and I’m out. Jack’s a movie star, Lou’s a screenwriter, they don’t like each other, their SOs just left them and married each other, and now the helicopter circumstances forced them to share has crashlanded in Alaska and someone’s trying to kill them. Will they be able to fight off their attackers AND the growing attraction between them?
Yes to the first, no to the second. And both pretty easily. Good thing they crashed so close to both a ranger station and someone’s hunting cabin. And good thing Lou lost the weight she had when she was younger, and Jack likes “spirited” women! Bleck. Things I hate: heroines who “used to be fat, that’s totally the same as being fat now, even if her new fabulous body is constantly referred to, right?”; also, asshole condescending men. Jack actually tells Lou, “You’re cute when you’re mad.” No one who said that to me would ever get any sexual attention from this cutie again. My anger is not cute. If you think my anger is cute, you obviously don’t respect me and can find your own way out of the Alaskan wilderness, thanks.
Not to mention: the Hollywood stuff all seemed immensely fake, though not as fake as the supposed serial monogamist Jack asking Lou to move in with him immediately after they sleep together, and asking her to marry him not long after. Meanwhile, the subplot about Jack and Lou’s widow(er)ed parents falling in love as well was both pointless and kind of gross. (Romances are supposed to be fantasies, wish fulfillment, right? Who in their right mind would actually want one of their parents and one of their boy/girlfriend’s parents to hook up as well? That is not the way to keep it all in the family!) Even picturing Jack as Paul Gross, which I started doing about a third of the way through, was not enough to make me like this book, or even feel engaged by it.
I still think there must be good Romances out there, and that I’m just clearly not finding them. However, I think I need to take a break from the genre for a while.