Book Review

Mister McHottie by Pippa Grant

Mister McHottie by Pippa Grant is a book that has been recommended to me by many, and was getting a lot of love on social media. Hype and good word of mouth is a heady combination for me so I picked up this enemies to lovers contemporary. Unfortunately, few things worked for me, such as the overall wackiness that bled into nearly every piece of dialogue and scene. As I read I realized that the exaggerated humor and comedy style fell flat for me. It made me feel like the fun police.

Chase Jett and Ambrosia “Sia/Bro” Berger have a past. They grew up picking on one another and playing pranks. Let’s say they were friendly adversaries. Until the night Chase ruins Sia’s life and takes her virginity in one fell swoop. Sia hasn’t had to think about Chase for years. Then the small-town-boy-turned-billionaire buys the company where she works, throwing the two into close quarters again.

A majority of my dislike for this book is firmly rooted in my own reading tastes, and I acknowledge that. There’s a subgenre of romantic comedies that are over-the-top, ridiculous in their humor, and feel slapstick in nature. These aren’t for me, though I didn’t know that before going into this one.

The goofiness was too much in both the character interactions and the writing. Every exchange Sia has with either her brothers or Chase turns into a laundry list of previous pranks they pulled on each other while growing up, some of which are concerning. Chase peed in Sia’s cereal at one point.

When it comes to the descriptions, they were rather odd and frequently took me out of the story. In one scene, Sia is described as having a “lizard tongue,” “giraffe legs,” and she looked like a “camel having a seizure” when she orgasmed. What? Are these things supposed to be complimentary from Chase’s point of view?

Because of these overtly silly scenarios, no one seemed real. Take this scene with Sia’s brother, Ares, who is a very successful pro hockey player:

I offer him a chocolate from the glass candy dish my admin insisted I needed. He swallows it, wrapper and all, then grabs the bowl and drinks the rest down.

This adult man not only ate one chocolate, still wrapped, but he proceeded to guzzle down an entire bowl. No one would do this. No one. But perhaps that’s what makes it funny? I don’t know. All I can say is that I didn’t laugh, especially when these moments don’t really seem special or important. They don’t punctuate or supplement exchanges of emotional maturity. There’s no balance and the book felt more like a series of bonkers vignettes without a lot of connective tissue in between.

The crux of the antagonism between Chase and Sia is a moment that affected the course of the heroine’s life. Chase and Sia’s constant pranking and teasing leads to an explosive moment in the back of their small town’s Bratwurst Wagon. He takes her virginity and when the cops show up, Chase tells her to run. He bails out the back, while she guns it in the wagon and leads the cops on a chase.

Ultimately, this could be due to a breakdown in communication. When Chase said run, he could have meant on foot and not in the wagon. Regardless, Sia is caught. Her sentence winds up being three nights in jail and some community service hours. However, she’s due to start college at Vassar and upon hearing of Sia’s arrest, they revoke her admissions. This causes her to–and I quote–”get a bachelor’s degree from a second-rate college.”

Present day Sia is doing fine, though! She works in the marketing department at a very successful company. But I need to rant.

CW/TW suicide, depression

I graduated sixth in my high school class, but completely failed out of university. There was a lot of family stuff going on that I won’t get into, but it led to depression, depression-induced insomnia, and a suicide attempt.

To rebuild my college career, I finished my Associates requirements at a local community college. I wanted to re-apply to my original university, but because of my previous academic standing, I was rejected. I applied to another university and got in. Since then, I’ve earned my Masters and I’m doing rather well–mentally, physically, and professionally. There are many students who share stories like mine, or who have struggled much worse than I did, or who don’t even get an opportunity to go to college (let alone get any sort of second chance).

And this heroine wants to complain about spending three nights in a county jail, having to do community service hours, and being forced to go to a “second-rate” college instead of Vassar.

Cry me a fucking river.

It was hard for me to find much sympathy for Sia’s resentment. College is a struggle for a lot of people, if they manage to get there. My personal experiences were at war with Sia’s experiences and feelings, and it really made me angry at her while I was reading. Her entitlement when it came to college and to what she felt she deserved underscored the feeling that I was really the wrong person for this book.

I can understand Sia still holding onto some bitterness where Chase is concerned. I just wasn’t on board with how much Sia resented Chase, given that this Bratwurst Wagon incident had no bearing on her daily life. It isn’t until Chase reappears in her life that she seems to become obsessed with it again.

Another issue: Whiteness. Most of the book is sent in present day New York City in the headquarters of a health food grocery store chain. Sia is friendly with her coworkers and has hobbies outside of work, including playing in a cover band. But everyone is White. One character is even royalty of a fictional Nordic country. So much thought went into listing and describing the pranks Sia and Chase played on each other as children, but when it comes to the setting, the world building, and the community of people around Sia and Chase, in a book set in New York City, there wasn’t a single person of color.

There were a couple of interesting breadcrumbs in the story that I wish were explored more and that could have brought balance to the silliness. The hero discovers that the board of directors has been quietly sweeping reports of work harassment and inappropriate relationships under the rug. Chase also notes that their most successful department–the marketing team–is all women, but the board is all men. He wants to fix that, so the people who have the ability to make changes accurately reflect the company’s makeup.

I would have loved to see Chase work with these group of women to improve the gender disparity, with Sia manning the marketing department helm. But I didn’t get that. I didn’t get anything even close to that.

For me, a successful enemies to lovers romance hinges on a few concepts.

  1. The hatred or dislike between the two main characters has to be understandable. Is this level of resentment comparable to the offending act?
  2. To get from enemies to lovers, there have to be scenes of trust building and a willingness to forgive. I need something to create the first cracks in those negative feelings. With Chase and Sia, I experienced no sense of growth at all, and I never thought Sia wanted to forgive Chase in any capacity.
  3. Lastly, there has to be some recognition of where things went wrong, admitting to that, and perhaps even an apology. We get one scene–ONE SCENE–that might have taken five minutes in real time that seems to erase a decade of bitter feelings.

My enjoyment of Mister McHottie was dependent on what I can and cannot believe in a contemporary setting. I love a good fart joke as much as the next person, but that’s not enough to build a plot around. Sia and Chase had good sex, though lacked the emotional connection I wanted to believe their HEA. The humor was too much for me and left me with headache from all my eye-rolling. Part of reading romance is finding out what does and doesn’t work for you. It’s becoming clearer and clearer that slapstick comedic romance is not my bag.

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Mister McHottie by Pippa Grant

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  1. DiscoDollyDeb says:

    Sometimes I think I just don’t have a sense of humor, based on what passes for humorous in romance novels. I know tastes are different, but when I’m supposed to find something funny because it’s either over-the-top or the characters find it hilarious, it rubs me the wrong way and I’m determined NOT to laugh (which isn’t difficult because what I’m not laughing at is rarely funny).

    The most laugh-out-loud I’ve ever done reading a romance novel was with Cara McKenna’s AFTER HOURS (which is quite a serious book about a nurse who works in a psychiatric hospital). There’s a scene where the heroine is debating with herself as to whether she’s going to sleep with the hero. She imagines her libido and her common sense getting into a fight—including the image of her libido tying up her common sense and throwing it in the trunk of a car. Now that made me laugh.

  2. JoS says:

    I can SO relate to your comment about being the fun police. I’m often of the minority dislikes of a popular book. It’s awkward as hell but you gotta be true to yourself, ya know?

    Also, why was Chase responsible for getting her arrested? Did he call the cops?

  3. PamG says:

    I think humor is fairly idiosycratic. I personally can’t stand humor that’s embarrassing to the participants. Humiliation implies a power imbalance so, not funny. If I’m cringing, I’m not laughing. Hence my longstanding dislike of “I Love Lucy.” Yet that show made Lucille Ball a comedic icon–a title she totally deserves. Her talent is unquestionable, but her style has never worked for me.

    This particular book sounds really shallow under the slapstick. I suspect it won’t be my cup of tea either, but sadly, I may have already purchased it. I recently reread Krentz’s Trust Me–my favorite of all her contemporaries–and it still made me chuckle without trying too hard. The humor is character based and no one is ground into dust for a laugh.

  4. Qualisign says:

    “Part of reading romance is finding out what does and doesn’t work for you.” So, so true (and very nicely put, Amanda). The past dozen years lurking about SBTB has taken me from rank romance n00b to a rather widely-read purveyor of tropes, genres, and themes. I have watched SBTB take on critical issues of representation, including sexism, racism, and ableism, as well as deeply personal and on-going battles with mental health and multiple (not to be listed here) things that go bump in the night and cause reviewers to appropriately list trigger warnings. I would love to see a SBTB monthly post that goes beyond book suggestions for a single trope and gets into a discussion of why a given trope (or genre or theme or …) works for the general population of SBTB. For example, as a woman of advancing age (I can personally attest to the damage the “summer of love” did to the power of women), I find a surprising ageism in romance novels, Courtney Milan’s recent novella notwithstanding. (Actually, I would include that novel, although I am very glad it was written.) I would love to interact with others about which themes do and do not work for readers, and why.

    Thanks for the review, Amanda! As always, it was a good think.

  5. EmilyB says:

    Pippa Grant is for sure a particular taste, very modern day screwball, and if her books weren’t in KU I don’t think I would necessarily have her on my must read list. I will say that her next two follow ups were more enjoyable – the one about Sia’s friend Parker and her romance loving librarian love interest, and then the one about Sia’s brother falling in love with a tough as nails badass pilot. Sometimes a little angst free, silly fluff is nice.

  6. quizzabella says:

    I’ve actually read this – didn’t by it, a friend lent it to me saying “I hated it, what do you think? I’ll read a lot of daft romance novels, but Ugh hard no from me. I like funny romance novels of all kinds, but being completely unbelievable like that chocolate scene is just weird. Also enough with the snobby college judgement. I got my degree from Oxford Brookes which is just up the road from the famous university. People looked down on me but I had some amazing, well respected and published lecturers. Brushing aside depression and suicidal impulses like that is not giving your character depth either. Depression is horrible, suicide is often lethal. Don’t just chuck it in there and then expect the reader to giggle at the next crazy antics those implausibly named characters got up to . It wasn’t romantic and I hated every character in it. That’s pretty much the harshest review I’ve ever given a book (and if the book is your jam then I’m not judging – plenty of stuff I enjoy in fiction would have other people rolling their eyes).

  7. MsCellanie says:

    When I saw your line “headquarters of a health food grocery store chain” I realized that I’d read one of this person’s books. It was also supposed to be funny and wasn’t.

    I love screwball comedy. I’ll watch Bringing up Baby and laugh my ass off every time that Katherine Hepburn says “I was born on the side of a hill.” But it doesn’t work unless the people are recognizable as people. People who weird things are happening to and people who go a bit farther than normal, but things you can imagine someone doing. So, someone picking up a candy and eating it, then picking up another piece and eating that, then eating another piece and another and another and another through the scene until they’ve eaten the whole bowl? that is in the realm of possibility and could be made to be funny (by a better writer than I). Someone picking up a whole bowl of wrapped candy and “drinking” it? No.

    The other book also had problems with antagonists to the hero and heroine who didn’t behave like real people, and so the “jokes” fell flat. Also the solutions to the problems they had also didn’t make any sense in reality.

    The other book had a librarian hero. Throughout the book, he recommends a lot of books and the ones that I recognized I either DNF’d or finished and hated. So it could just be that the author’s taste, style, and sense of humor and mine completely don’t connect.

  8. DonnaMarie says:

    Dying is easy. Comedy is hard.

  9. Deianira says:

    This is interesting. Pippa Grant is my go-to author when I need something light, silly & fun, & while this is by far my least favorite of her books (Chase is annoying & I can’t quite grasp “Sia” as a nickname for Ambrosia) I still liked it. Apparently humor is very much a matter of personal taste!

  10. Ele says:

    I recently read this and others in the same series because they are in Kindle Unlimited. I found this one pretty meh, except for the fact that the hero/heroine backstory is so absurd, and not in a good way. The heroine’s teenaged hi-jinx (for which she experienced FAR fewer consequences than most people would for doing the same thing–stealing a vehicle) is not something that a reasonable person would carry a life-long grudge about, at least against a person who wasn’t actually to blame for what happened. The review mentioned the heroine’s brother, who eats the chocolate. As I recall, the book in this series about that brother –Ares — is one that I kind of liked. He seems to be on the autism spectrum (maybe anyway) as he pretty much doesn’t talk, and ends up with a ventriloquist, which had some fun moments.

  11. Lisa F says:

    Whoof, the hero peeing in the heroine’s cereal is NOT cute!

  12. DiscoDollyDeb says:

    @Deianira said “I can’t quite grasp “Sia” as a nickname for Ambrosia.” Yes indeed! I read a book last year where the heroine’s name was Sabrina, but her nickname was Brin (which I assume rhymes with “in”) which made no sense to me because I’ve always heard the name pronounced “Sa-bree-na” not “Sa-brin-a,” so where did Brin come from? It only makes sense if you “see” the name and don’t “hear” it.

    /“Inexplicable name” rant over now.

  13. LauraL says:

    The 12-year-old in me does come out from time-to-time, but humor at the expense of others, slapstick, and “fart jokes” make me cringe. When authors like Jill Shalvis and Kristan Higgins devolved into that brand of “wacky” humor, I stopped reading them. I grew up with a prankster brother who still thinks he is hi-lar-eee-ous despite nearing retirement age and have lifelong scars. Some are actual scars.

    @Amanda, thanks for the warning and the thoughtful review.

  14. JenM says:

    Humor is so in the eye of the beholder. I’ve tried many “screwball” and romantic comedies over the years and they usually leave me completely cold. Like @PamG, I loathe so-called embarrassment comedy which seems to be the main kind out there these days and was not a fan of Lucille Ball.

    However, I love Pippa Grant and am slowly working my way through her books. They are total comfort, happy sigh books for me. I’ve read five or so of them so far. Mister McHottie was her first book and probably my least favorite although I enjoyed it enough to move on to her next books. As always, I’m amazed at the diversity of stories and opinions in romancelandia and so very happy that we can all find something that appeals to our individual tastes.

  15. Hhh says:

    I tried two Pippa Grant books when I was trying KU. I read the Hero and the Hacktivist. It should have totally been my opposites attract crack-nip, (Navy SEAL and hacker recluse, hello!) But it was somehow completely unmemorable and definitely not funny. I had to look it up to even remember what book it was and what it was about. I read another Grant co-wrote called Hosed that was a bit better written, but again, not memorabley so and definitely not funny. Comedy is so hard to write, so I really sympathize, but these fell flat for me. You can still try them if you like silly comedy, but only if you already have KU. I wouldn’t go out of my way for these.
    I recently wound up cancelling my KU because I found most of the books were like these. Just okay, way overhyped in the reviews, and ultimately not worth the monthly fee. Honestly, I have WAY more respect for publishers and book editors now. The layers of subpar they have to get through to pull out the gems! I honestly feel better supporting them with my measly monthly book budget. That and my local library is enough!

  16. PamG says:

    @Hhh

    Crack-nip is the name of my next band. Thanks for that.

    I want to recommend a non-fiction author I read many years ago–Regina Barecca. Her first book was They Used to Call Me Snow White…But I Drifted: Women’s Strategic Use of Humor (1991). She’s an English professor at UConn, and she’s hilarious. Her focus is humor and women’s studies, and I remember how impressed I was with her delineation of differences in men’s and women’s humor. At the time the perception that women’s humor was subversive was such a revelation to me.

  17. AmyS says:

    Thank goodness for the variety available in romance books. I would hate for all of the stories to be serious, relatable, true to life, politically correct, etc. All of us have such different tastes that make us wonderful. I read a wide variety of authors, so I can get a wide variety of characters and HEAs. I do read Pippa Grant’s books when I want to feel happiness and escape from all the crap that is real in the world. I appreciate authors and books that give me that vacation for several hours.

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