Tina's Reading Books

I have so many feels about this book.  it is going to be a loooong review.

This is the first book by JJ Murray I have ever read.  I have always been very curious about his works since he seems like something of an outlier.  He is a white male author who writes romance novels that feature black heroines.

One of the questions that seems to pop up with some regularity when discussing diversity and inclusion in romance is how a white writer can write non-white characters and make them feel 'authentic' (it is funny how that question never really seems to come with up non-white writers writing white characters...but I digress..)

Leaving aside the question of 'authenticity' (because really, every person has a life experience that informs their character and behaviors of which race and ethnicity only plays a part)  I will say that Murray does well by his characters.  Actually he does well by his heroine.  I was not as impressed with how he positioned some of the men in the story.  But I'll get to that in a bit.

The story set up is fun and interesting and the book starts out very strongly.  Sonya Richardson is an ex-WNBA player who has settled into a fairly comfortable if unexciting existence.  She gets a phone call out of the blue from her ex-publicist who has a proposition for her.  Would Sonya like to star in a Bachelorette-type reality show where she gets to pick/discard possible suitors each week?   After some back and forth posturing, Sonya agrees.

In the meantime our hero John is also picked to be one of the suitors.  In a nice nod to subversiveness, John who is white is actually picked by the producers solely because he is white for his token status (they need "diversity" on the show) and with the surety that he won't be the final suitor.  Unlike the other prospects who are all black, young and jocks, John is 40 years old and a pastor from a small town in Alabama.

As the narrative moves into the meat of the story, it remains fun.  The writing is witty and light and you anticipate how the competition will play out.  Of course Sonya is going to fall for John -- this is telegraphed from the beginning.  But part of the allure is figuring out how it is going to happen.

However after what is a promising start and a very engaging first 40-50% of the book, it begins to slowly implode in both credibility and interest for me. 

The best part of the book is the relationship between Sonya and John.  The author does what a lot of the good romance authors do and lets his two mains connect through conversations, personality reveals, and a potent attraction to one another.  He builds a wonderful chemistry between the two of them.  This, along with some great dialogue,  is worth all three stars I rated the book.

The strength of the characterization of Sonya and John is in sharp contrast to the rest of the characters and makes sitting through the rest of the reality show narrative somewhat tedious.  Since you know Sonya and John are really feeling it for each other from the start, the playing out of the rest of the show with the other characters feels like spinning wheels. I found myself at a couple of points checking my kindle percentage and was surprised to see I was only at 60% or 70% etc.

And that gets me to the parts of the book that really didn't work well for me and ended with me feeling a little more dissatisfied in the end than when I started what felt to me a really  promising book.

First and foremost the supporting characters are pretty cardboard.  We get quite a few of them -- Sonya's secret daughter Kim, Aaron the 'villain' on the show, Michelle the trifling publicist,  Bob the young heartless network exec, Larry the producer with a heart of gold and pretty much most of the other bachelors.

None of them were given any real depth.  The worst, imo, is Kim, Sonya's daughter.  Sonya had her very, very young and gave her up for adoption and reconnected with her after she turned 18.  Kim is introduced as selfish, entitled, thoughtless, mean, critical, promiscuous -- I could go on.  I could not find a redeeming quality in this girl.  While the author tells us that Sonya feels guilt for giving Kim up, he never really explores why Kim is such a harpy.  What did her adoptive parents do to make this happen?  Who were they?  Why is Sonya so blind to her daughter's faults.  I hate that Sonya was such a pathetic enabler to Kim's lazy entitled ass.  But then miraculously! Kim is transformed by the power of love.  Such a horrible character construct in every way.  There was nothing about her that made her a person. 

In that vein the other bachelors were also all very 2-dimensional.  To the man they were handsome, big, black and jocks.  There is one scene where one of their challenges is to discuss an art house movie they saw and while the others talk in generalities or seem flummoxed by some of the themes, John breaks it all down with $1,000 words.  There was an unfortunate undertone to their characterization that they were also kinda dumb jocks.  I say unfortunate (rather than racist) because while this reinforces the stereotype of the black athlete being about power, instinct and skill and less about intelligence, I get the impression that the author would have very much still included this scene if the jocks had all been white as well.  But they weren't,  they were black.  And it rings a bell that has been too familiarly been rung before.  It is too bad because the whole idea of he entire scene was the build up John (who had been unimpressive to this point in the eyes of the tv viewing audience) at the expense of the others.  That it took this form to highlight his intelligence over the others reads as problematic.

At a fairly early point we were down to only a handful of characters and it feels now like such a wasted opportunity not to have given us some real development with them.  The page space was there but it felt utterly wasted.

My second issue with the story is how the whole reality show angle played out.  Now, i know that this is all fiction but there is no way in hell Sonya would have had the autonomy to make as many on the fly changes that she did with the structure of the show.  Or that her insistence that Kim be included to the extent that she was would have been honored.  Kim was basically a second player.  As I read on, this aspect of the story became less and less believable.  Of course, right at the outset I had credulity issues because we are told that Sonya is a savvy businesswoman who has been able to comfortably live on her earnings (and support her shiftless, loser daughter) because she invested well - blah, blah, blah.  And yet who signs a contract to go on a reality show without having a lawyer read it thoroughly?  What about having a psychological profile done?  And what was up with all the fake names and bios?  One of the set ups is that Sonya's identity was a secret to be revealed to her final suitor and to America.  Until then she was going by the name of 'Jazz.'  Uh, Sonya was in the WNBA and was on an Olympic gold medal winning team, and yet we are supposed to believe that nobody watching the show would cop to her real identity? In this day and age of Google and Youtube?

Third, I did notice the author had a writers' tic with internal dialogue.  Sonya and John think.  A LOT.   Their internal thinking is presented almost as if it is an aside, the dramatic convention where a stage character is speaking to the audience with the understanding that the other characters can't hear them.  In the book this is characterized by italics.  There are a LOT of them.  I don't quite know how I feel about this.  The asides themselves were quite funny and did a good job to flesh out their personas.  But...there was just so much of it.

And finally I had problems with the religious intrusion.  Admittedly, this is a personal preference thing and not really a problem with the writing or the story.  So this isn't a true flaw in the story.  Religious fiction just simply is not my thing.  And honestly I would not characterize this as truly religious fiction since the message isn't for the reader to be inspired by the character's love for God.  But I did find the quoting of bible scripture and  the relating of life events to bible scripture intrusive in places.  And there were one of two times when I felt like I felt precariously close to almost being preached at.

In the end I enjoyed the book as I was reading it, until I really wasn't anymore.  I came out of it ultimately more disappointed  at what I felt was a failure of character development for quite a few characters who took up a lot of page space.  There was so much to like that it is a shame it wasn't capitalized fully.

So even though I didn't come away from this book loving it, I did still come away with a genuine liking for the way the author writes -- italics aside.  It doesn't put me off him the way some less than successful first forays into an author' works might.  So I plan to try him again.