The Perfect Date
The Perfect Date is the most frustrating reading experience I’ve had all year. The heroine and her son are extremely engaging, but the hero is less than worthy of her most of the time, the plot is overly dramatic and the gobs of girl hate that spatter the novel and a number of poor editorial choices all conspired to drag the final grade ever downwards.
Nearly-graduated nursing student Angel Gomez is a single mom and has worked her butt off to get where she is. She and her young son, Jose – a die-hard Yankees fan – live over the beauty salon owned by her friend, Gabriela, who often looks after Jose while Angel tends bar at a strip club during the night. When Jose has an asthma attack he can’t self-treat, the two women rush him to the ER, where he meets a calming stranger.
Unbeknownst to Angel, that calming stranger is Yankees pitcher Caleb ‘Duke’ Lewis. Duke has a nagging ankle injury, but he’s been lying to the team manager that his joint is healed and is in fact working injured – against his doctor’s advice. Between the trauma of the incident, the pain of his injury and his last break-up, Duke has taken to heavy drinking and has thrown himself even deeper into the partying lifestyle that’s brought him so many problems.
Angel and Duke meet again at the club she works at, where he drunkenly taps her on the shoulder and asks if she takes her top off for tips. She throws an old fashioned in his face. Clearly, true love is brewing here. When he finds out her boss fired her for assaulting a star baseball player with booze, a guilty Duke tries to apologize to her. This leads to an impulsive kiss – which results in them being spotted by the press. To avoid having the true reason for his repeated ER visits discovered, Duke asks Angel to pose as his girlfriend. That causes a ton of problems – for Angel with her creepy doctor boss, for Duke with his greedy father, and for the both of them with Regina, his model ex-girlfriend who might be violent enough to part them before their story can truly begin.
Ignore the blurb and cover for this book – if you’re expecting a gentle contemporary romance, it’s not going to be your cup of tea. In fact it’s like Dynasty meets the latter seasons of The Game; loud, brassy and angry.
The Perfect Date starts out feeling like a spicy, fun contemporary jaunt through New York. I loved Angel and the world she comes from right from the start, and that affection continued throughout the book. She has realistic flaws (a nasty temper that causes violence on at least one occasion and that unfortunately gets more extreme and cartoonish as the book progresses) and she felt like a realistic person when she wasn’t behaving like a D-level reality show contestant thanks to narrative circumstances. Her relationship with Jose and friendship with Gabriela are beautiful.
But the book has a big problem, and its name is Duke, who, with his arrogance and alcoholism, becomes the second least-attractive hero I’ve read about all year. He often comes off as wildly self-centered and more about shaming other women than respecting Angel. Oh, and he’s a murder suspect for most of the book.
In fact, the book has a general dearth of likable characters. Many are hateful – for instance, to Duke and the narrative alike all women are bitches; or rather everyone except for the magical Angel, who is “real”, curvy, non-glamorous and has attitude. The book counterbalances that with Angel’s circle of close friends, who are diverse and funny, but since we see half of the book through Duke’s eyes we don’t get to hang out with them nearly enough to make this worthwhile. And to be fair most of the men besides Duke in the novel don’t come off that well, either.
These unlikable characters group together to form a resistible package. It didn’t help that I honestly couldn’t buy Angel and Duke’s relationship at all. I did believe them as friends with benefits who might grow a grudgingly respectful relationship. But true love? Nah. He physically manhandles her, dragging her around by the arm on one occasion, hard enough to leave bruises. She sleeps with him directly after he does this. The narrative and Angel constantly excuse Duke for his behavior like an abused ex. He’s kidding! He’s drunk! It’s ‘okay’ because she snaps and snarks and yells at him (hint: it’s not) . The sex is good and he’s good with her son, but I shudder at the notion of them permanently being together. Their romance and the way it’s written strongly hints to me that the book started as a women’s fiction novel that ended up being marketed as a romance when it got no bites.
The plot is really convoluted. Do the authors expect me to believe that Angel wouldn’t recognize Duke by name when her son constantly listens to his games? Did they bother to do any research about baseball at all? Do they think a press corps so dedicated to following Duke’s every move wouldn’t have been tailing him around or know that Angel wasn’t with him while he’d been clubbing around the city? That a famous supermodel could do what she did without someone else figuring it out first? There’s an entire subplot where Angel is sexually harassed by a supervising doctor – a man who makes her so ill with his harassment that her hands shake – and after pages of build-up it’s dealt with with four pages and a shrug.
The writing acumen of the authors – one of whom is a star of the VH1 show Basketball Wives and is apparently trying to aim the novel at fans of the show – is fairly average and extremely florid. The story is plagued by frequent head-hopping; every single time the narrative moved between Angel and Duke, there was no transition scene or notation – simply a newly indented paragraph. This was horribly distracting and made the novel hard to follow.
It hurts me to say this because I desperately want to see more romances with PoC characters in them, but I have to call the authors on the wooden, clichéd voices used for the black and latinx characters in this story. As a latinx woman I cringed at some of the crude, cheap stereotyping here and noticed multiple awkward ‘fuck it, let’s run it through Babelfish’ style uses of Spanish. The Perfect Date is a perfect flop. Well, in all ways but one. Too bad the story isn’t about Angel, Gabriele and Jose running around New York. That’s a story I could’ve believed in.
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Lisa Fernandes is a writer, reviewer and recapper who lives somewhere on the East Coast. Formerly employed by Firefox.org and Next Projection, she also currently contributes to Women Write About Comics. Read her blog at http://thatbouviergirl.blogspot.com/, follow her on Twitter at http://twitter.com/thatbouviergirl or contribute to her Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/MissyvsEvilDead or her Ko-Fi at ko-fi.com/missmelbouvier
Book Details
Reviewer: | Lisa Fernandes |
---|---|
Review Date: | June 15, 2019 |
Publication Date: | 06/2019 |
Grade: | F |
Sensuality | Warm |
Book Type: | Contemporary Romance |
Review Tags: | AoC | baseball | PoC |
A belated comment to say I’m glad I saw this review! I was browsing through contemporary romances at the store yesterday, adding several to my wishlist. This one sounded interesting, but something niggled at me. Maybe a memory of this review or the icky scene I came across. Also, it was from 2019, and they still want $10.99 for the Kindle edition. So I checked here… and then backed away from the book very quickly.
Blackjack, you’re definitely not the only one. I want covers to depict the feel of the novel and the reason why I would read it. Like you, that equals the relationship and not the sex. Most mainstream erotica covers are considerably more discrete than many romance covers.
This cover would totally have sucked me in, it’s exactly the style I’m a sucker for. Thanks for the warning.
I reviewed The Friend Zone, which also had this cover style and title structure, and which ALSO wasn’t actually a contemporary romance but probably more of women’s fiction. I know marketing is chasing what sells, but in the long run I think this is alienating and frustrating for readers and likely to lead to pretty angry reviews. Say what you will about clinches, but at least as knew what they meant!
I’ve been banging this “misleading cover” drum (both here and at Smart Bitches) for a while now. The latest one was FIX HER UP by Tessa Bailey—a cutesy cover for a book by Tessa “queen of the dirty-talking alpha hero” Bailey? It’s a misleading bait-and-switch which will turn off readers. Can we agree that any book that includes explicit, detailed oral sex scenes (among other things) should not have a cutesy illustrated cover?
/Dismounting soapbox now.
With the Bailey it’s super egregious. Like guys, just plaster a dude with muscles on the cover, that’s her scene.
When I checked this out on Amazon to grab the ISN code for my review, i saw that The Friend Zone comes up as recommended alongside it, Looks like they’re trying to intentionally market the books this way.
This topic would be great for a blog! I virulently dislike romance covers with male chests and ridiculous abs that objectify bodies, but I also hesitate to look twice when a book features a solo man on the cover unless reviews push me to take a second look. I’m also not a fan of clinches either though because I read romances first and foremost for the emotional connections between people. I admit that these new cover styles largely appeal to me and I think it’s because they put the early emphasis on a relationship rather than sex (I’m not arguing against sex in romance books!). I don’t actually think of the new covers as advertising platonic or sexually chaste relationships, but I suppose I think of them as advertising a a romantic comedy. I also like neutral covers that focus on a theme or setting. I wonder if the drawings are selling because others out there feel the way I do about the traditional covers. I kind of always assumed that romance readers like the male chest covers and that I was the odd one out. I notice on Netgalley that one of the questions publishers ask when reviewers/readers request books is whether the cover appeals to them.
This is a great idea! The Cover Debate has been going on since I feel forever in romancelandia. I remember that there used to be leather slipcovers sold in various places embossed with things like ‘it’s not porn’ so people could read their clinch cover romances in peace on the bus and subway.
I think it’s one of those cases where you can’t please everyone. I’m not a fan of man-titty or half-naked-clinch covers either, and if you look at the images used on the UK editions of some romances – I’m thinking particularly of books by Julia Quinn (line drawings/cartoon-y), Elizabeth Hoyt, Mary Balogh and others – they’re completely different to the US ones. But then I see comments around GR and other review places where people say they love the half-naked man covers. I’m convinced the difference has something to do with the fact that us Brits are so repressed (!) and someone has decided we won’t be able to cope with the raunchy covers! (Or maybe, we’re likely to go for something more tasteful!) But – speaking as an ex-marketing and PR person – I agree that the move towards the cartoon-ish, rom-com covers is being done mostly to pull in those who would never be caught dead reading a romance novel. The stupid thing is that, until recently, romance readers bought more books than readers of every other genre, so you’d think that appealing to your target audience would be enough. But romance price points are so low, that I also suspect it’s partly due to publishers trying to find ways to have them NOT look like romances so they can keep the price points up.
For marketers trying to reach a broader audience, I think the drawings could be effective and time will tell. I suppose if conventional clinch or male chest covers raked in enough money, change wouldn’t be needed. Capitalism always searches for new markets though, and so I’m not surprised publishers are experimenting with new covers in hopes of more profit.
I am so happy that I read on kindle.
I am generally a private person, and I do not want people to judge me by my book’s cover :-)
I hate most romance covers, abs are objectifying men, cute cartoons are wrong except for really rom com my stuff, clinches objectify everyone, men scary enough to be frightened of ( mafia boss cover) turn me off, weird non historical dresses…. I remember hating the posy on covers, …
Maybe I hate a lot?..no, not really.
Agree with you all about the misleading, and wait for covers I love.
You’re welcome! We just ran a series on athlete romances and I know that there’ve been a few A and high B reviews for contemps with woc and moc heroines and heroes posted fairly recently! I hope you get a better one than this!