This RITA® Reader Challenge 2016 review was written by I Am Kate. This story was nominated for the RITA® in the Short Contemporary Romance category.
The summary:
A kiss at midnight…
Ten years ago Ruby Wetherspoon shared a stolen New Year’s kiss with enigmatic stranger Alex. A kiss she has never forgotten…
Now a renowned language therapist, Ruby is stunned when her Alex—Crown Prince Alexander of Euronia to the rest of the world!—shows up to ask for her help.
Ruby has never been far from Alex’s thoughts, but duty to his country has kept him away. Now he has a chance to make both their dreams come true…
Here is I Am Kate's review:
Plot Summary: Ruby Wetherspoon is in Paris for New Year’s Eve. She gets separated from her friends (which seem to all be imaginary, save one) and ends up losing any way to contact them. She’s plucked from a crowd and stands on a wall with the mysterious Alex.
They kiss—with fireworks—they eat food, they fall in love with each other in an hour or two. Then, a man in black emerges from a crowd, whispers something in Alex’s ear, and Alex has to go. He won’t be able to show her the sights in Paris because he has to return home immediately.
Fast forward ten years. Mysterious gigantic bouquets of flowers are arriving at Ruby’s workplace and have for the last ten years, or six years, or three years—it depends which part of the story you’re reading.
Ruby did figure out who Alex was through a couple of Google searches, thank goodness. Prince Regent Alexander something-or-other of Euronia. (Because this is how we name tiny European countries.)
Alex shows up, says he needs her help because she’s a celebrated speech pathologist (huzzah!) who works with children—and it just happens that he has a child that doesn’t speak. Even though he’s had the child assessed by ten other SLPs.
What I liked about this:
I loved that Euronia only has two major sources of income: tourism (but tourists aren’t allowed on Sunday, it seems) and tax benefits. Now the accountant in me loves that taxes are such a focus in this story, but the realist in me knows that tax shelters aren’t really tax shelters if the country sheltering them…wait—are your eyes glazing over? Okay, fine. I’ll geek about taxes to someone who shares my passion.
I liked that there was a reality to the process of the child’s speech assessment. I had a child who didn’t talk until he was three, so it was cool to see. However, taking six months to assess the child might have been a little overkill.
As it was mentioned in another review, I liked the pink palace. I guess it really is pink and was an embarrassment to Alex at one point in his life:
Ruby stood up. “Wow! It looks so different, seeing it from the sea. It really does look like something from a little girl’s toybox. It’s gorgeous.”
Alex rolled his eyes. “You can imagine how I felt as a teenager, living in a pink palace.”
And the pinkness continues, at least in my mind:
Ruby. She’d been fixed in his mind for the last ten years. Her brown curls, dark eyes, red coat and a carefree attitude had wrapped their way around him like cotton candy around a stick.
What I didn’t like:
Seriously, ten years before he contacted her? There was a missed connection in the past that the author really could have explored. When they were in France, she mentions that she’s working with stroke victims to regain speech. The king had a stroke and couldn’t speak. Why wait, Alex?
I’ll be honest, I wasn’t really feeling the connection between these two. I didn’t like Alex, who seemed to be a laid-back but insecure guy who had no friends.
I wasn’t a fan of Ruby. She made no sense to me—confident in one scene, horribly insecure in the next. Even her friend treats her like she’s an invalid at times. I dislike that she majorly violated medical privacy rules.
The HEA was contrived, especially since Alex seemed to make her skin crawl:
A whole host of tiny centipedes were marching along her arms with their hundreds of legs, making every single hair stand on end.
And when her skin wasn’t prickling, his cologne was hypnotizing her:
She could smell his aftershave—it was coiling its way around her. Who was the snake in that childhood film? Kaa, in The Jungle Book—with the hypnotic eyes that could make you do anything that he wanted.
Not to mention that Alex is obviously an inconsiderate lout:
Her foot hesitated at the gangway. His heart gave a little twist. He hadn’t even asked her if she was afraid of water.
Seriously…who thinks of that? I wouldn’t ask anyone if they were scared of water.
The dialogue was stilted and it seemed like they talked past each other more than a talked to each other. There’s an editing error in the dance scene where a couple of paragraphs were duplicated. I don’t know if it’s slang, but there were a few words that my dear Kindle couldn’t even come up with translations for. The timeframes are weird, as is the blocking for this novel, with the characters jumping around in time and space.
I read a bunch of RITA winners a couple of years ago and decided they had something in common. They were quirky, not really predictable, and well-written. I think this fits into all three categories, but not at a level that I expect.
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Good review, thanks! This sounds like the type of story that could be really fun if it were written in a more expansive, “organic” way (I don’t know what to call it – by someone who wasn’t bound to a strict category wordcount and deadline, I think is what I mean) but that as written feels sort of like a made-for-TV movie that isn’t very good.
Thank you for your review.
After reading what you have written and been astounded by the number of inconsistencies you mention I completely fail to understand how you could say it was well-written because up until that second when I saw those words, I expected you to say something very different.
If the author can’t keep straight how many years the flowers have been sent and there are words that defy comprehension, “well-written” is not what I would say.
I would have been interested in reading more of your thoughts on taxes and Euronia as a tax haven.
What annoys me is that living in a pink palace is played off as unmanly – I don’t think any fictitious European Royalty would really give a fig about that if that is the traditional color.