A fizzy tale about an entirely inappropriate but entertaining love affair.
A mentally ill woman meets the world’s hottest psychiatrist in this giddy romance.
Twenty-year-old Mercy Kavanaugh has been in and out of mental hospitals since she was abandoned in childhood by her parents. They were members of a religious sect who thought her violent hallucinations, which felt as if she was being skewered with nails and burned with acid, were caused by demonic possession. She and the rest of the psych ward are shaken up by the arrival of Dr. Travis Sutton, a new psychiatrist who, with his tousled hair, jeans, and muscle T-shirts, looks more like a Hugo Boss model than a shrink. Sutton good-naturedly parries Mercy’s defensive snark and soon declares a breakthrough: She’s not suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, as previously diagnosed, but from PTSD caused by the cultic abuse she suffered as a girl. He takes her off antipsychotics, reviving her libido, and applies his signature treatment of cradling her in his arms and soothing her tears after she has nightmares. Coached by her gal pals, Mercy tries seducing Sutton with outrageous sex talk during their sessions and, to make him jealous, a flirtation with a male patient. As she stampedes over Sutton’s weak protestations about transference and his medical license, passionate make-out sessions ensue with much groping and fondling. Alas, their love is threatened by federal regulations that will age her out of the hospital on her 21st birthday and into a halfway house. Decker’s yarn features an ideal lover, a dreamboat who’s fascinated by every wrinkle of the hero’s psyche in addition to her body, set in a glamorized rendition of a mental health facility that’s full of good-looking patients who don’t even seem crazy, just oversexed. The author’s skillful prose plangently evokes Mercy’s loneliness and fear of abandonment in the novel’s opening. (“Following each return to the unit, each searing disappointment, I let go of a little more hope,” Mercy muses of her rejections by foster families. “Once I was all hollowed out, I understood that no one would save me.”) After Dr. Sexy perks her up, though, the writing takes on a salacious energy and cheer. (He: “I have something for you.” She: “Is it a vibrator?”) Readers will root for Mercy’s campaign to undermine the psychiatric profession’s code of ethics.
A fizzy tale about an entirely inappropriate but entertaining love affair.Pub Date: Feb. 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-7329645-2-5
Page Count: 265
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: Aug. 14, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
Haphazard and undemanding.
A sports agent’s first official client is the man she dumped years ago in college.
After two years of hard work as an underling, Nora Mackenzie is finally being promoted to full-time sports agent. She’s worked hard, kept quiet, and allowed men in the office to call her Mac—a nickname she hates—all to show she’s a team player and “one of the guys.” Unfortunately, her boss instructs her to sign Derek Pender, a football player coming off an injury, who happens to be the man she heartlessly dumped in their senior year of college. Derek signs with her for revenge, seeing it as his opportunity to pay Nora back for callously breaking his heart eight years earlier. He insists she be at his beck and call: answering his emails, running his errands, cooking dinner for his dates. He also refuses to let her explain why she broke up with him without warning or explanation. Nora feels she has no choice but to acquiesce to Derek’s humiliating demands, since she’s worked too hard to let him ruin her dream job. She hopes he’ll thaw and they might become friends, but Derek’s bad behavior is designed to hide the fact that he’s still in love with her. Nora’s characterization is uneven, veering between anger at how she’s treated in the male-dominated field to immature bickering and bantering with Derek. Although Adams likely meant for Derek and Nora’s interactions to have an enemies-to-lovers vibe, the characters instead seem juvenile and stuck in the past. The novel is fueled by a string of tropes—second chance romance! married in Vegas! only one bed!—each randomly deployed to keep the book going despite thin characterization and wan plotting.
Haphazard and undemanding.Pub Date: April 2, 2024
ISBN: 9780593723678
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dell
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
Sink your teeth into this delightful paranormal romance with a modern twist.
A vampire and an Alpha werewolf enter into a marriage of convenience in order to ease tensions between their species.
As the only daughter of a prominent Vampyre councilman, Misery Lark has grown accustomed to playing the role that’s demanded of her—and now, her father is ordering her to be part of yet another truce agreement. In an effort to maintain goodwill between the Vampyres and their longtime nemeses the Weres, Misery must wed their Alpha, Lowe Moreland. But it turns out that Misery has her own motivations for agreeing to this political marriage, including finding answers about what happened to her best friend, who went missing after setting up a meeting in Were territory. Isolated from her kind and surrounded on all sides by the enemy after the wedding, Misery refuses to let herself forget about her real mission. It doesn’t matter that Lowe is one of the most confounding and intense people she’s ever met, or that the connection building between them doesn’t feel like one born entirely of convenience. There’s also the possibility that Lowe may already have a Were mate of his own, but in spite of their biological differences, they may turn out to be the missing piece in each other’s lives. While this is Hazelwood’s first paranormal romance, and the book does lean on some hallmark tropes of the genre, the contemporary setting lends itself to the author’s trademark humor and makes the political plot more easily digestible. Misery and Lowe’s slow-burn romance is appealing enough that readers will readily devour every moment between them and hunger to return to them whenever the story diverts from their scenes together.
Sink your teeth into this delightful paranormal romance with a modern twist.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9780593550403
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
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