The Book Gourmet

***copy provided by publisher through NetGalley***

Vivienne Taylor is doing everything she can to help her destitute father, even if it means burying her true characters as deep as she can to ensnare an appropriately wealthy husband. But once she's accomplished that, Fate seems to conspire against her, since her childhood crush, and irredeemable rake, Lord Dashiell is back in town and she can't seem to help herself from gravitating toward him, no matter what the Bible teaches her, and certainly despite his every effort to keep her away. And to top it all off, someone seems to be blackmailing her aunt, and Vivienne knows there's no one else to turn to but Dashiell himself.


This certainly started off great. I laughed my heart out at the end of chapter one, and was really looking forward to the rest of the story. If chapter one was a hoot, the rest must follow suit, right?

Wrong.

This story, that started off so great, failed miserably to deliver on the promise of the first chapter. I hated both the main protagonists, him for being such an annoyingly dysfunctional, emotionally stilted, rather wimpy asshole, and her for being so obnoxiously naive that she ended up sounding like an idiot. I felt they both needed someone to lead them through life by the hand. Add to it the pretentiously pious aunt (who turned out not to be as virtuous as she wanted to appear), the jerk of a fiancé that was even more false in his piousness than the aunt, a slower than slow pacing, a plot rife with fillers (idiotic musing, idiotic conversation, idiotic decisions, idiotic actions etc.), so-called humor that made the whole story appear like a parody, and a jumbled suspense side-plot that made little-to-no sense in the end, and you have this story...A complete waste of time.

The only redeeming thing this story possessed were the hero's grandfather and the dog.