This RITA® Reader Challenge 2017 review was written by HeatherT. This story was nominated for the RITA® in the Erotic Romance category.

Here is HeatherT's review:

Oh, hey. I agreed to review this book, but I don’t really remember much about it even though I finished it yesterday. I know that it mostly was about decorating a house, and that the heroine had a secret and that there was a LOT of not particularly interesting sex.

Let’s try this again. The book starts with Vessa, our heroine, visiting a woman named Donna (like a title) Edith. Donna Edith matches people with various needs – we know that from the frontispiece of the book, not the book itself. It appears that Donna Edith is meant to be a gimmick around which a series will be built. Vessa just moved back to Vermont, but for some reason needs to keep her presence in the state a secret. She is a scene painter and she needs a job. Donna Edith sets her up with Killian, a young architect who needs a model home decorated in a short time.

Vessa and Killian meet, immediately agree to work together and then they each spend a lot of time thinking about and having pants-feelings for the other, even though they have scarcely spoken. The story is mostly decoration porn. As the project goes along, each room is lavishly described, right down to each layer of glazing on the walls. No room is simply painted – there are stripes and chair rails and wainscoting and layers and layers of glazing. There are screens and plants and trompe d’oeil. For some reason, there is a garden chair crammed into a tiny powder room. It is all a bit much, and not to my taste, but that is really what the book is about — rugs and pillows and pictures and lampshades. Somewhere along the way, Vessa and Killian start having sex.

For a book that is billed as erotica, the sex was remarkably unimaginative. There is a lot of it, but it gets less interesting as the book goes along. There’s face-to-face vaginal sex and occasional oral sex or handjobs in every room. Sometimes she’s even on top! The sex seems to end quickly after penetration and is always from the male gaze. Seriously, it had all the excitement of seeing rabbits in spring — just a vague sense of “there they go again.”

The book was relatively well-written with good secondary characters (including a female plumber, yay!), excellent consent and a relatively interesting backstory for Vessa, involving her secret – which as secrets go was a pretty believable one that worked for present-day. I did enjoy that Vessa and Killian behaved like adults; that when there was a problem, they behaved like real people would (they used words!) and there was no sign of the magic peen or magic hoo hoo. But Killian was one-dimensional; he only existed as a foil for Vessa and his more interesting friends.

Also, the book had strange moments that continually took me out of the narrative. Among them:

• Vessa, a set designer, shows up to measure a room with a tailor’s measuring tape (the kind some of us use to see how resplendent our butt has grown). Killian, the architect of the fucking house, doesn’t offer to give her the plans so that she’ll have the measurements handy.
• A gardener is described as “his fingers and jeans were stained green.” Ummm, that’s not how gardening works.
• This: “The subdivision lay in a sprawl below, streets meandering around a few huge maple trees, unbuilt lots marked with surveyor’s flags. . . She stepped to a window, ‘The view is fantastic.’”

The strangest moment, yes, even stranger than a gardener with literal green thumbs or an unfinished subdivision as a fantastic view, was the climactic scene. Vessa is specifically hiding her presence, even her existence, at the insistence of a Specific Person. However, when that Person discovers that Vessa is in town, that Person throws a very loud, very public fit in front of lots of people that draws everyone’s attention to Vessa and who she is. Huh, what? Wasn’t the whole idea to deny Vessa’s existence?

In the end, if you are fond of over-the-top decorating (okay, even I found the old apothecary bottles charming), this book might be for you. Read it for the decoration porn; God knows that the other kind isn’t going to be very satisfying.