| Title: | Romancing His Rival (Accidentally Yours Book 3) | |
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| Author: | Jennifer Shirk | |
| Publisher | Entangled: Bliss | |
| Publication Date: | February 11, 2019 | |
| Publisher's Description | Hopeless romantic Elena Mason doesn’t often hate people, but she hates her ex-fiancé’s insufferable best man, Lucas Albright III. She just knows Lucas is the one who talked her ex out of getting married—so Lucas is clearly the cause of all her problems. And now she’s expected to work with him? Oh, heck no. Lucas Albright wants nothing more than to make partner at his advertising firm, and he knows he works best alone. But then Elena ends up as his partner on an account that could win him a promotion. He had a great reason to end her engagement, not that she’d ever believe him. Still, he’s willing to try working as a team. Unfortunately, his new “partner” wants him dead. Elena knows she’s going to have to give in and work with her nemesis, though nobody said it had to be easy for him. But what happens when fighting starts feeling a whole lot like falling in love? |
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| My rating: | ** | |
What did I just read? Or, more accurately, what did I just read 39% of? Because Romancing His Rival was a total DNF for me and that’s as far as I got before I just couldn’t take it anymore. I regularly get emails from Entangled and occasionally open them. This book, newly released this week, sounded interesting to me, so I downloaded and read the sample. It wasn’t a lot to go on, but it held my attention long enough for me to decide to buy it right away. I wish that I had slept on this decision or something. The rest of the book (that I got through) did not work for me. My major problem was that Elena, with her dogged devotion to schedules and recreating the past, seemed way too immature for any romantic relationship, much less marriage.
I don’t have an excessive amount of patience for a lot of things or people. I expect adults to act like adults and for things to make sense, and it annoys me when one or the other of these expectations is not met. At the beginning of this novel I sympathized with Elena, whose wedding had been called off when her Lucas, the best friend of her (now ex-)fiancé Scott, convinced him not to marry her. It seemed like a pretty terrible way for both men to have conducted themselves, and I was totally on her side. Of course, since the advice-giving best man was also the dude she’d be in love with at the end of the book, I knew that there had to be more to the matter than what Elena initially thought and I was looking forward to seeing how the two points of view would be bridged long enough for them to fall in love. That’s going to have to remain a mystery for me (at least for now) because Elena’s odd insistence on recreating her late parents’ relationship struck me as at best immature and at worst fairly creepy. She wanted to get engaged in December because her parents had. Scott’s original proposal was at the top of the Empire State Building, as was her parents’.
Months after Scott broke things off, Elena mostly refused to acknowledge that things were over. She hadn’t gotten back the deposits on the venues and services that had been booked for their wedding, holding out hope that they would reconcile with enough time to still get married. WHAT? Elena’s obsession with meeting what are ultimately arbitrary deadlines and schedules seemed excessively not okay and worried me. Why would a well adult human being behave like this? Lucas, bless him, was kind of a mess, too, but nobody was going to out-kook Elena (or, I suspect, out-jerk Scott), so overall he wasn’t a problem. The way that he ended up in Elena’s life had me rolling my eyes a bit, but I appreciated that he was in a bind that only she could fix.
I couldn’t stop cringing whenever Elena said or thought something that showed how slavishly she tried to make her life fit into the narrow mold of behavior she deemed acceptable. I was embarrassed for her when she told Lucas that she would provide the artwork he needed for his job only on the condition that he help her not only to get Scott back, but to have him propose to her again in December. As Liam Neeson recently learned, probably everyone has thoughts that it’s not great to share out loud, but Elena exhibited the same level of control regarding disclosure of her craziness.
Scott, of course, was totally dismissive of Elena (even though I found her terminally silly, I still wouldn’t have talked down to and about her as he did, especially if I’d once proposed marriage to her). Among other things, he had a problem with the town where she lived, her lack of a college education, her career, and her hobbies (so, basically everything about her), and only found her interesting again once he learned that she would be working with Lucas. More than once, I struggled to understand what it was about this particular man that Elena loved and missed. The early revelation that he had the same job that he father had had upped Elena’s creep factor significantly, especially when his cavalier attitude towards her was contrasted with how devoted she claimed her father was to her mother.
This is a lot of words about a book that I neither enjoyed nor finished. I read for fun, information, and entertainment. This book failed on all of those counts, and probably several more. I am not familiar with the Entangled: Bliss line, so maybe this, like Harlequin Presents, is just not an imprint that I can expect to work for me. It’s too soon to say, but if I find myself having a similar reaction to other books from this line, I might just skip it entirely in the future.
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