Book Review

Cover (Story) Girl by Chris Mariano

I really, really need a vacation, but between work and personal obligations, that’s not going to happen till next year.

So I’m turning to the next best thing – vacation romances.

Cover (Story) Girl by Chris Mariano is a Filipino romance set on the island of Boracay in the Philippines.

A quick image search tells me that Boracay looks like this:

A white sand beach with a calm, turquoise ocean. Two lounge chairs face the ocean, an umbrella keeping them in the shade. Between them is a table with a tropical drink on it.

I would like to be there now, please.

The entire story is told third person POV from the hero, Gio Torres. He’s the head curator of the Boracay Heritage Museum, and he’s pretty much a workaholic. Gio does his job, then goes home where he lives with his mother and grandmother, and Skypes with his sister who is away in college. One thing I liked about this book was that Gio’s relationships with the women in his family were very important to him.

One day a Korean woman, Min Hee, comes into the museum and turns Gio’s life upside down, in a vaguely Manic Pixie Dream Girl type of way. Gio winds up as Min Hee’s unofficial tour guide. She’s beautiful, and also very mysterious. Every time Gio asks Min Hee about her life, or why she’s in the Philippines on vacation, she comes up with a new outrageous answer to give him.

As the novel progresses, it becomes clear that Min Hee is running from something. She has two cell phones, gets angry phone calls, and hides behind giant sunglasses and floppy hats. All of this has a K-drama feel to it. Gio tries to get to the truth of who Min Hee is, but she evades him. Gio is a quiet, predictable, slightly nerdy hero. Min Hee pulls him out of his routine, and tries to get him to loosen up a little.

They spend a lot of time together, and Min Hee becomes invested in helping Gio with an exhibit he’s working on about a former governor. There’s a secondary romance here (well, sort of) where Gio and Min Hee discover that the late governor may have had a youthful affair with an artist, and the pair try to track the artist down to confirm the story.

This book is full of small scenes which were full of larger meaning. For example, the sexual content of the book is low. The physical intimacy stops at kissing, but there’s still a lot of sexual tension. This passage struck me by being relatively chaste but also fraught with tension:

Min Hee patted Gio’s knee and kept her hand resting lightly there. They sat in there in companionable silence, letting the sights and sounds of the beach just wash over them. He bit into a muffin. Backpackers walked along the street, weighted down by their huge knapsacks. A tricycle with a board strapped across its roof rattled by. A family of local tourists came back from their morning excursion and headed straight for the breakfast buffet. Above them, the warm island sun slid past the protective shade of the coconut trees and cast light shadows across their faces. It seemed like the most ordinary of mornings, yet Gio could smell the sea and vanilla in the air and they made everything come alive.

His finger nudged hers. When she didn’t protest, he slowly slid a strong hand over hers, fingers locking into the spaces between. They were both looking elsewhere, as if trying not to care about contact and intimacy and things that trembled. But Gio quickly glanced down to see her creamy hand tucked beneath his large, tanned one.

I loved how simple the gesture of holding hands was, but how intimate the author made it.

Similarly, there’s a scene where Gio reveals how much Min Hee has come to mean to him when he discusses her with his grandmother:

Gossip traveled fast in small provinces. Even before Gio could bring up Min Hee to his mother and grandmother, they seemed to have found out about it.

Lola Lising [Gio’s grandmother] stared at him blankly when asked. “Your cousin Carlos was here the other day. He said his mother was at the exhibit launch and your Auntie Teresa told her about the Korean girl. I thought you meant to tell me first? I am disappointed in you, hijo.”

“There was nothing, uh, definite to tell, Lola.”

“And now?”

He smiled. “I’d like to invite her over to have dinner with you.”

I also loved the descriptions of the island, and getting to see Boracay as Gio showed it to Min Hee.

Still, the book wasn’t perfect. A lot of the conflict could have been resolved simply by Min Hee and Gio having an honest conversation – both about their feelings and about what Min Hee was hiding. I also wasn’t crazy about never getting Min Hee’s POV. It makes sense, as it keeps her (and her secrets) ultra mysterious, but it also made her occasionally feel very two-dimensional. I’m not a fan of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl angle, either, since it sets Min Hee up mostly to be a tool for Gio’s growth. When I read romance novels, I usually deep-dive into the heroine’s POV, so missing that ruined some of the experience for me.

I still bought the romance between Gio and Min Hee (and the ending had a really great scene), but without a well developed heroine the book overall felt lopsided.

That said, Cover (Story) Girl will definitely appeal to fans of K-drama and romance readers looking for to escape to well-described and beautiful locale.

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Cover (Story) Girl by Chris Mariano

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  1. Ren Benton says:

    “Lopsided” is my problem with all single-POV romances. The other person’s feelings are left entirely to the interpretation of the protagonist, which gives me an immediate unreliable-narrator vibe (especially when the single POV is the dude’s because we all know how sensitive and insightful men are when their pantsfeelings are at stake).

  2. Ren Benton says:

    Addendum: Okay, single-POV women aren’t substantially better, believing the guy is in love when he could very well be reading from a script designed to get Little Richard wet.

    Point being, I’m skeptical af unless I hear both sides of the story.

  3. Louise says:

    Tangentially: Does the book give any clue how “Gio” is pronounced? It would drive me bonkers if I imagined it one way and then I pick up an audiobook that rendered it differently. (Think Lord of the Rings movies, where apparently nobody involved in the production knew how to say “Sméagol”.)
    #1 “jo” (like the beginning of Giorgio)
    #2 “jee-o” (same, but two syllables)
    #3 “hee-o” (Spanish pronunciation of -gi-)
    #4 “hyo” (same, but in one syllable)
    #5 “ghee-o” (with “hard” G)
    #6 “ghyo” (same, but in one syllable)
    #7 “yee-o” (yes, OK, now we’re getting Germanic)
    et cetera. Or is he so good-looking that the reader doesn’t care?

  4. Re “Gio”

    In the Philippines (where the book is set) it would be #2.

  5. Chachic says:

    YAY! I’m so happy to see Chris Mariano’s book reviewed here. I really enjoyed reading this and I keep recommending it to romance readers. Loved the setting and the writing. Boracay is one of the most popular beaches here in the Philippines, and I love how Chris gave us the POV of someone local instead of the more common tourist.

    Hope this encourages you guys to pick up more books from romanceclass (a community of authors and readers of indie pubbed Filipino-romance-in-English).

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