| Title: | The Grunt | |
|---|---|---|
| Author: | Latrivia Nelson | |
| Publication Date: | July 2011 | |
| Publisher's Description | RiverHouse Publishing, LLC | |
| My rating: | **** | |
This book’s storyline and writing deserve 4.5 stars. Compared with other contemporary romance/erotic romance novels, this book is easily one of the best things I’ve read all year. I’m giving it 4 stars though, because of all the errors in the text that I read (the Kindle edition, which I bought and downloaded on August 17, 2011).
Courtney and Brett forged an intense emotional bond rather quickly, but in the context their individual situations, it was completely believable. Her dad and her brother’s reactions to Brett were annoying but also made a lot of sense within the story. Their objections were on multiple levels: familial, racial, and hierarchical. There’s a lot of history between white men and black women, and it was refreshing to have Ms. Nelson acknowledge this, without ever resorting to cliches. Although David was pretty one-dimensional, I liked that Ms. Nelson gave the Colonel depth that even his daughter didn’t know about. It went a long way toward making me respect him, despite the narrow facet of his personality that he chose to show his daughter.
I never got the feeling that either Brett or Courtney was secretly guilty of fetishizing the other, as I sometimes do in interracial romance novels. They reveled in all that comprised their lover, including skin tone and physical attributes, but I felt liked these things were prized because to the lover, instead of the lover being prized for possessing said attributes. Empty objectification gets old pretty fast in a novel, and makes me wonder whether the end’s Happily Ever After is more of a Happy For Now.
Really, the only problem that I had with this book is the seeming lack of editing that took place in it. A lot of the errors in this story’s text were so easy to spot that it seems unlikely that a professional editor would have missed them. There was just a staggering amount of typos, instances of incorrect word choice (“wonder” for “wander”), and incorrect phrases (“speak your peace” instead of “speak your piece”, calling Brett a “widow” instead of a “widower”) in this book. There was also this head-scratcher: Brett’s favorite band was the Kung-Foo Fighters. When I first read that, I thought that Ms. Nelson meant the Foo Fighters. She didn’t. So why invite this type of confusion by giving the band a name so similar to a real (and really popular) band? That made no sense to me.
It’s a shame that Ms. Nelson’s publishing company didn’t do better by this book, because it really is very enjoyable.
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