Snowbound in Her Boss's Bed
Marcella Bell’s Snowbound in her Boss’s Bed makes the same mistake I’ve seen in a few books lately – focusing on the wrong part of the story.
Miriam Howard, event planner, is the daughter of a Black pastor and hasn’t fit in with her family since she converted to Judaism. Temporarily hired to replace a scandal-tainted gala coordinator, she has to knock a Jewish foundation’s annual fundraiser out of the park to win the job of her dreams on a permanent basis. That means appeasing Benjamin Silver, billionaire megadonor – even if he insists she fly to Aspen on the first night of Hanukkah. Where they are promptly stranded by a snowstorm, and of course tempted to reproduce the exact boss-employee scandal that gave Miri a shot at her job.
Miri has a fascinating background that could have driven an original, compelling, and challenging plot that confronted inclusion and validation of converts to Judaism, discrimination against Jews of color, holiday conflicts in multifaith families, the hope of her family that she might marry Christian. Instead, the author has Miri come into the book having fully and confidently resolved all of her issues and with an established (if off-screen) found family. So what does the author choose as the main conflict? Benjamin’s fear of opening up to love after loss. The same conflict that drives a solid half of billionaire and Harlequin presents books. A conflict that forces Miri to spend the entire story as Benjamin’s therapist. Oy.
A book that could have hit a trifecta of under-represented religion, under-represented ethnicity within that religious group, and under-told holiday story instead becomes yet another generic billionaire-with-commitment-issues book that took me two months to finish. Save yourself the trouble and give it a miss.
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I'm a history geek and educator, and I've lived in five different countries in North America, Asia, and Europe. In addition to the usual subgenres, I'm partial to YA, Sci-fi/Fantasy, and graphic novels. I love to cook.
Buy Snowbound in Her Boss’s Bed by Marcella Bell:
Book Details
| Reviewer: | Caroline Russomanno |
|---|---|
| Review Date: | December 25, 2022 |
| Publication Date: | 10/2022 |
| Grade: | C |
| Sensuality | Warm |
| Book Type: | Contemporary Romance |
| Review Tags: | AoC | Hanukkah | Holiday romance | Jewish | Jewish hero | Jewish heroine | PoC |
This sounds like it’d be up my ally — until we get to the wee-wah “billionaire can’t commit” plot. Sigh.
The whole boss trope in romances is so distasteful to me. I can’t get past that.
For me, it depends on the couple. I’ve read some boss/employee books where the power dynamic doesn’t seem super skewed. They often work for me.
It’s a trope I like, or have liked, but one I am much more cautious about these days. I am much more conscious of the possibility of creepiness or harassment when there’s a power imbalance. Is this boss going to be the prince, the soldier with the cloak of invisibility, or Rumplestiltskin?
For me, I’ve always let the characters define what is and isn’t OK. I couldn’t like a book where the heroine/hero let themselves be treated as less. But if they believe they’ve found love, I am usually OK with it.
I tried reading the start of this book on Amazon, but there was a strange structure to the narrative – about ninety per cent of it seemed to be made up of one-sentence paragraphs. It gave the text a jerky feeling.
Oh ugh. I had that too but my copy was an ARC. It was so blatantly bad that I assumed there was a technical formatting error. How frustrating that an editor didn’t step in.