Book Review: Text 2 Lovers by K. Webster

New adult, x-rated, romantic comedy

Text 2 Lovers (2 Lovers #1) by K. Webster

Reading Level: Adult Romance
Release Date: January 21, 2017
Length: 275 pages
Source: Purchase
Reviewed By: Kate McMurry

Dani AKA ”Buttercup” and Ramsay AKA ”Ram” have a classic "meet cute" that is a vital component of all good romantic comedy. Dani drunkenly texts someone whom she assumes is her cheating ex, a man she has dated for eight months and who has just dumped her for another woman days after talking her into loaning him $10,000. Because her BFF moments before deleted the ex's phone number from Dani's contact list in her smart phone, not to mention that Dani is drunk on the tequila said BFF keeps pouring down her throat, it's no wonder that Dani accidentally types in a wrong number. As a result, her first and subsequent rather incoherent texts are delivered to a stranger, a fellow twenty-something who, luckily, is amused rather than offended by her texts. And thus begins their often amusing, and frequently X-rated, romantic journey.

This is an excellent update of the "you've got the wrong number" romance plot which, since the days of smart phones, has been difficult to convincingly create. As described above, this "meet cute" ploy is very well done.

In most ways, this is a typical New Adult romance, which is a good thing if you like that genre's conventions, and not so good if you don't. One rather unusual aspect for NA is that this book is a romantic comedy, which is quite rare in a genre noted for its angst-filled melodrama. The light tone means that this book's plot doesn't get bogged down in the usual NA "tortured hero" tropes, even though the hero, Ram, at least initially, is depressed. Depression is serious business, which means it's a difficult choice to carry off in a light-hearted comedy. The authors manage it by the simple expedient of Ram cheering up substantially after the perky heroine splash-lands into his life.

For those who like familiar byways in NA, Ram is, of course, quite handsome and heavily muscled. And happily, the authors demonstrate him earning those muscles by regularly lifting weights--which not all romance authors bother to include in their stories, in which, all too often, heroes magically are muscled and lean and heroines are slim and shapely, in spite of no visible exercise and terrible, high-calorie, junk-food-and-booze-laden diets. (Actually, Dani doesn't exercise, frequently drinks beer and eats fattening, unhealthy food, and is miraculously slender even so. Oh, well.)

As so many NA readers prefer, Ram is loaded with tattoos, and he is presented as being something of a "bad boy," but not, thank goodness, in the standard sense of that overused term equating with his being a "man whore." I'm not personally a fan of heroes who are promiscuous, so I was delighted to discover that Ram does not use women as sexual objects to prop up a fragile male ego. For the most part, he is simply a confused twenty-something who is having a career crisis and has a painfully tragic history of personal loss in his family. In fact, he is far more Beta male than Alpha in the sense that he is a sympathetic, supportive listener and unfailingly kind to the heroine.

The heroine, Dani, is a quirky Pollyanna type who, in the beginning of the book, is essentially a codependent doormat. That kind of heroine can really bog down the plot of a book because she tends to be a passive protagonist and, as such, is not very sympathetic. Fortunately, in this story, almost immediately, Dani attempts to develop some backbone, with the encouragement of both the hero and her loud-mouthed, slutty best friend (another standard-issue NA subcharacter that readers of this genre either enjoy or dislike). Dani's story goal is to become the "worm that turned," a confident woman who can finally give a resounding, "No!" to the various users abounding in her life, as well as to be more adventurous in her sex life, with the hero's help, of course.

Speaking of the latter, above all, as is typical of NA, this book is a series of sex scenes voiced in unromantic, gutter language, strung together with a simple and fairly limited plot. Again, fans of the typical tropes of this genre won't mind that at all. For myself, I get bored with sex scenes, and in this book, as in most romances, I skimmed the sex and stuck with what I found most interesting and rare, amusing banter between the hero and heroine and the many heart-warming examples of the hero treating the heroine with respect, compassion and kindness.

I rate this book as follows:

Heroine: 4

Hero: 4

Subcharacters: 3

Comedy Elements: 4

Romance Plot: 4

Writing: 4

Overall: 4

Book Review: Knitting Under the Influence by Claire LaZebnik

Terrific book by one of my favorite authors

Knitting Under the Influence by Claire LaZebnik

Reading Level: Adult Romance
Release Date: November 15, 2008
Publisher: 5 Spot
Length: 412 pages
Source: Purchase
Reviewed By: Kate McMurry

In this frequently humorous novel set in the glitzy world of LA, three best friends who are in their late 20's regularly connect to knit together and gossip about their lives. Two of the friends, Lucy and Sari, have known each other since childhood, and Kathleen is a latecomer to the team. She is a fraternal triplet with two identical twin sisters who have been actors since babyhood. As such, they are, I assume, purposely reminiscent of the Olsen twins.

Kathleen is gorgeous and is willing to have sex with an interesting, attractive man, but she doesn't commit, because she has a low threshold of boredom. At the beginning of the book, she walks out of her long-term, greatly under-appreciated job as live-in caretaker of her sisters and ends up landing immediately on her feet as a housesitter for a $2.5-million, downtown apartment owned by 47-year-old, divorced, real-estate mogul, Sam.

Sari has an autistic older brother, and her career is counseling and teaching autistic kids. Her romantic interest is the father of an autistic four-year-old. She believes (but is not absolutely sure her memory is accurate) that years ago, in high school, he either actively participated in, or stood by and did not stop, harassment of her autistic brother.

Lucy is a brilliant scientific researcher engaged in animal-testing on rats who has been dating an equally brilliant researcher for quite a while. He is handsome and she's very sexually attracted to him, but he is a judgmental, narcissistic jerk. Unfortunately, Lucy, who used to be quite overweight in high school and is now svelt and attractive, suffers from low self-esteem and figures that she would be nuts to walk away from such a socially high-status boyfriend. Meanwhile she regularly verbally skirmishes with, and also strongly respects, her lab partner David, who is half Chinese, half Jewish, and every bit as brilliant as her jerky boyfriend, but not remotely as good looking or high status.

The central core of the book, as is the case with all women's fiction (versus romance fiction), is the relationship between the three women. The author presents an idealized view that they will be there for each other when, eventually, their future husbands inevitably desert them (because men are cads), and their ungrateful, future, teen and adult offspring sneer at them or ignore them. In a great many chick-lit novels, especially those by this author, there is a theme that is also a staple of young-adult fiction, "coming of age," that is, over the course of the novel, the protagonist gains much greater emotional maturity and hard-won wisdom than she displays at the beginning of the novel. This particular chick-lit novel is rather a hybrid of chick-lit and romance fiction in that all three female protagonists gradually move beyond the premise that only female friends can be trusted, into more of a romance-novel world view, that it is possible to form healthy, mutually supportive, heterosexual, mated relationships. They accomplish this by growing beyond a long-standing habit of passively complaining to each other about their dysfunctional romantic relationships to, instead, displaying strong, personal, emotional boundaries and directly confronting the men in their lives, thereby allowing those men to either step up to the plate and prove that they can be mature, too, or walk out and remove their destructive, egocentric selves from the heroines' lives.

I admit freely that I am a fan of Claire LaZebnik. I have read every one of her books, most of them twice, and this one three times. Let me further say that is quite a compliment because, as you can see by many of my remarks above, that I am not at all a fan of chick lit and never have been. I much prefer the greater optimism (as I see it, anyway) of the romance genre. Chick lit has been around for several decades, ever since Bridget Jones's Diary, and involves a very narrow range of female experience, essentially clueless and immature twenty-something women who form close friendships with other women but have a lot of dating disasters with equally clueless and immature men. The ultimate conclusion of such books tends to be that it is amazing that heterosexual twenty-somethings ever manage to form healthy romantic alliances at all, and maybe it isn't even worth trying--why not just stick to your female friends, who will always be there for you emotionally, and call it a day? In short, even when they are humorous, the underlying world view of chick-lit novels tends to be rather depressing, especially when everyone involved is copiously drowning their social frustrations, or boosting their courage to resume the romantic fray, with buckets of booze, or either loading up on junk food (without, improbably, getting fat) or engaging in anorexic behavior to stay thin (though I will admit a certain amount of this same behavior occurs in many modern romance novels, especially the Harlequin Blaze type novels).

For the very reason that I'm personally not fond of chick lit, I've asked myself frequently why I like this book so much, and my ultimate conclusion is I can't get enough of Kathleen and Sam, both individually and as a couple. Kathleen is rather ditzy and she drinks too much, as I've mentioned that most chick-lit heroines tend to do, but I love her natural athleticism, her complete detachment from the utter superficiality of the Hollywood world she has been on the fringe of for years, and her careless disinterest in the power she could easily wield over men if she chose to do so due to her obvious physical beauty. Instead, the focus of her life is her friendships and her great zest for engaging in witty banter with all comers.

Speaking of that banter, anyone who is a fan of the famous, Regency-romance author, Georgette Heyer, who is a master of witty banter, will love Kathleen and Sam, and Kathleen's banter in general with her two women friends as well. There is also, to a lesser degree, some banter between Lucy and her romantic interest, David. In my humble opinion, the ability to engage in verbal wordplay (or as an author, the ability to write it in dialogue) is a sign of creativity and high intelligence, and I savor it wherever I can find it. (There is quite a bit of it, by the way, in the Harry Dresden series by the brilliant Jim Butcher, one of the major features I enjoy about Harry as a character, above and beyond what he is most famous for, his bravery and power as a fighting wizard.)

I also love slow-burn romance plots, especially romances that begin with a wary slide into friendship, and the relationship between Kathleen and Sam has all those features. For that reason, it is one of my favorite romantic relationships among all of Ms. LaZebnik's books.

I rate this book as follows:

Heroine Kathleen: 5

Heroine Sari: 3

Heroine Lucy: 3

Hero Sam: 5

Hero Jason: 4

Hero David: 4

Friendship Plot: 5

Romance Plot Kathleen: 5

Romance Plot Sari: 3

Romance Plot Lucy: 4

Writing: 5

Overall: 4