Talent for Trouble
Grade : C-

As titles go, Talent for Trouble is quite apt, because I found this book chock full of contradictions. By turns hilarious, engaging, boring, and over the top, the book is the epitome of a hot mess. But there was a point where the book took a turn into permanent bizarro territory, and it lost me.

Up until the exorcism became serious, I was kind of going along with it. Ms. Sey’s contemporary world is over the top, true, with finances (hero’s rich family) and family problems (rich heroine’s abandoned niece) and appearances (curvy and blonde and beautiful) and vocations (butlers, TV presenters, and unspecified genius businessmen, oh my!) that really only exist collectively in fiction. But that’s not unusual, and it can be fun.

And I wasn’t super happy being dropped in the middle of a hatefest between Audrey Bing and William Blake, which apparently had been established in full in the previous book. I had no context for Audrey and William’s mutual hate, which made their romance a lot less meaningful. But then again, Ms. Sey doesn’t treat the reader like an idiot with masses of info dumps, and I’m a big girl. I could fill in most of the blanks, even though there were more blanks than I’d care to have.

But then I actually started to think about it. Audrey is housekeeper-cum-butler for the rich Blake brothers, but is about to do a runner because she’s being blackmailed by her father. Who wants to wrest Audrey’s abandoned niece away from her. Because young Jillian is being possessed by her dead grandmother. So Audrey wants to run away, but then William decides to do a deal with Audrey’s father that involves…beating him up? Ruining him? Blackmailing him back? None of the conventional options, I assure you — nope, William glowers at the pater and looms over the father, then turns around and gives Jillian to them so the mother can be exorcised. And by the time the exorcism is over, all the family conflict has more or less disappeared.

How magical. Give me a second while I gag.

And don’t forget. This is a romance. In the space of one week Audrey and William go from seriously hating each other (and being hateful to each other) to having mad sexual connections. Whatever.

By the time it was clear that Jillian really was possessed by her mother, and William had some psychic secrets of his own that were driving him insane, I was done. This book is too short and waaaaay too ambitious to decide on what it wants to be (dramedy? psychic thriller? hot romance?), and one of the results is that the psychic stuff (which takes up a good portion of the book) is too ridiculous and too damn serious. Ms. Sey goes overboard with William's inner doings - inner voices, inner dials, inner orphans, inner oceans (don't ask) - it's a wonder she gives him actual dialogue. Little things then popped up that irritated the hell out of me. I don’t see how it’s physiologically possible for Audrey's mouth to form a perfect O of astonishment while she's saying “From what”. Unless she goes back to forming the perfect, astonishing O after speaking, in which case she should go back to looking pretty with her mouth closed. That kind of posturing takes energy.

That being said, I wasn’t lying at the beginning. There are hilarious parts, the best being a four-page romance novel primer delivered by Will’s younger brother. It is an engaging book, even when it’s being completely frustrating, and that’s because when the prose is restrained rather than congested (which it is a lot - see Will's inner thingies), it produces a deft turn of phrase. And I really liked that Will was unconventionally attractive — skinny, beak-nosed, nerdy. Generally, my kind of guy. Generic, this book is not. I give major props for Ms. Sey for being ambitious and different. But good? Not wholly, and not to me.

Reviewed by Enya Young
Grade : C-

Sensuality: Hot

Review Date : February 28, 2014

Publication Date: 2014/02

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Enya Young

I live in Seattle, Washington and work as a legal assistant. I remember learning to read (comic strips) at a young age and nowadays try to read about 5-6 books a week. I love to travel, especially to Europe, and enjoy exploring smaller towns off the tourist track though London is my favorite city in the world.
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