Author: Stefanie London

Review: Bad Reputation by Stefanie London

Posted March 11, 2019 by Rowena in Reviews | 9 Comments

Review: Bad Reputation by Stefanie LondonReviewer: Rowena
Bad Reputation (Bad Bachelors, #2) by Stefanie London
Series: Bad Bachelors #2
Also in this series: Bad Bachelor (Bad Bachelors, #1)
Publisher: Sourcebooks, Sourcebooks Casablanca
Publication Date: August 7, 2018
Format: eBook
Source: Purchased
Point-of-View: Alternating Third
Genres: Contemporary Romance
Pages: 379
Add It: Goodreads
Reading Challenges: Rowena's 2019 GoodReads Challenge
Amazon | Barnes & Noble | The Ripped Bodice | Google Play Books
one-star
Series Rating: two-stars

Wes Evans, son of Broadway royalty, just wants to achieve something without riding on his family's coattails. Too bad the whole world is talking about his sex life after the notorious Bad Bachelors app dubs him "The Anaconda." But when he sees a talented ballet dancer, he knows she is exactly what he needs to make his show a success.

Remi Drysdale only had one thought when she fled Australia for New York--never mix business with pleasure again. Ever. She gets the perfect chance to reclaim her career when a handsome stranger asks her to audition for his show. Remi promises herself not to tangle with the guy who holds her career in his hands...no matter how enticing his reviews are on the Bad Bachelors app...

Bad Reputation is the second book in Stefanie London’s Bad Bachelors series and it follows the heroine from Bad Bachelor’s friend Remi. Remi is a ballet teacher whose dream of dancing in a ballet company is dashed by bad decisions and assholes in the company and because of those past experiences, Remi walks away from that culture and those people. She is doing good things for the dance studio that she works for and though she thought she moved on from that life when she gets a shot to dance in a new production, she can’t help but jump right back into the thick of that life.

Wes Evans quit the family business to go his own way. He has plans to start an off-Broadway show and it’s an uphill battle. When he finds his female lead at his niece’s ballet class, things start to look up but something is keeping her from shining in the way that he pictured and so he takes it upon himself to help her get over the mental blocks that are tripping her up. Things are complicated with his female lead because there’s a strong attraction brewing between the two of them and jumping in there is just not in the cards, which sucks for him but it is what it is.

The romance in this book is complicated because the heroine had legit hang-ups about mixing business with pleasure and her hero is part of her business. So I understood her reservations, even supported them but I really struggled with the way that she struggled with her performance on the job. There’s a bit of mystery surrounding the hang-ups she had but they came out in a clunky way that had me rolling my eyes because while I understood that she couldn’t be with Wes because of those hang-ups, not knowing the entire story behind her hang-ups and why it was part of her performance anxiety made me less patient with her performance issues. Does that make sense?

I also had issues with something that Wes does that pissed me off and it was just one more strike against my enjoyment of this book and that’s before we get into the same issues that I had with the whole Bad Bachelor thing. It comes up again and just interferes with Wes’ hard work and the career that he’s trying to build for himself and once again, there was not enough remorse from the owner of Bad Bachelors that I just kept right on being pissed the fuck off. In Bad Bachelor, Reed was getting bad reviews from salty exes but in this book, Wes was getting rave reviews because of his big dick and honestly, that was just gross but the thing that royally pissed me off is that Remi went to the owner of Bad Bachelors and asked her to take a review down that was hurting Wes and could quite possibly cancel Remi’s show. It was a dishonest review and Remi explains all of this and the bitch owner had the audacity to say…no. There wasn’t any evidence that the review was not an honest one and her hands were tied so there’s really nothing she can do. Bitch, you own the damn site. Remi is one of your friends. She is going to lose her job because of your bitch ass app. I’m sorry but if it were my friend, you need that shit gone, it’s gone. No question. I do not give a shit if it was honest or not, if my work is hurting my loved ones, the shit will be gone and I would not give two shits who is pissed off about it because that’s what being a friend is.

Honestly, who the fuck needs enemies when they have friends like this bitch?

Another thing that pissed me off in this book was the so-called friendship between the three heroines in this series. Mainly, it’s the heroine of the third book who is the owner of Bad Bachelors but I didn’t understand why the other two friends stayed friends with her, were loyal to her. In Book 1, she shows her ass and Reed catches her and she doesn’t do enough to make up for the mess that she was responsible for in regards to Reed’s personal life. In fact, she tells Reed and Darcy to keep her secret from Remi because she didn’t trust Remi to keep shit quiet? I’m sorry but those rules don’t apply to your close friends. If you can’t trust that your close friends will keep your secrets, why the fuck do you have close friends? She wasn’t keeping the secret to protect them, she was keeping those secrets because she didn’t trust that they’d keep their mouths shut and that just rubbed me the wrong fucking way. The only thing that I liked in this book outside of seeing Remi fix her relationship with her mother and seeing Wes fix his relationship with his own mother was that in the end, Remi and Bad Bachelor Bitch are in a strained friendship right now. Their relationship should be on the rocks. Bad Bachelor Bitch proved that she doesn’t have your back and you don’t need that kind of negative shit in your life so good for your Remi.

This book wasn’t for me, can you tell?

Grade: 1 out of 5

Bad Bachelors

one-star


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Review: Bad Bachelor by Stefanie London

Posted March 7, 2019 by Rowena in Reviews | 1 Comment

Review: Bad Bachelor by Stefanie LondonReviewer: Rowena
Bad Bachelor (Bad Bachelors, #1) by Stefanie London
Series: Bad Bachelors #1
Also in this series: Bad Reputation (Bad Bachelors, #2)
Publisher: Sourcebooks, Sourcebooks Casablanca
Publication Date: March 6, 2018
Format: eBook
Source: Purchased
Point-of-View: Alternating Third
Genres: Contemporary Romance
Pages: 384
Add It: Goodreads
Reading Challenges: Rowena's 2019 GoodReads Challenge, Rowena's 2019 New to Me Challenge
Amazon | Barnes & Noble | The Ripped Bodice | Google Play Books
three-half-stars
Series Rating: two-stars

Everybody’s talking about the hot new app reviewing New York’s most eligible bachelors. But why focus on prince charming when you can read the latest dirt on the lowest-ranked “Bad Bachelors”—NYC’s most notorious bad boys.

If one more person mentions Bad Bachelors to Reed McMahon, someone’s gonna get hurt. A PR whiz, Reed is known as an ‘image fixer’ but his womanizing ways have caught up with him. What he needs is a PR miracle of his own.

When Reed strolls into Darcy Greer’s workplace offering to help save the struggling library, she isn’t buying it. The prickly Brooklynite knows Reed is exactly the kind of guy she should avoid. But the library does need his help. As she reluctantly works with Reed, she realizes there’s more to a man than his reputation. Maybe, just maybe, Bad Bachelor #1 is THE one for her.

I read this book last week and needed to sit on my thoughts for a little bit because though I enjoyed the romance between Reed and Darcy, this book is problematic as hell and more than once, things that happened and people that are introduced pissed me off so much that I had to keep walking away and coming back because I wanted to punch a bitch in her fucking rat face.

So this series follows three friends as they fall in love with the men from the Bad Bachelor’s App. The Bad Bachelor’s App is an app that was created for the women of New York to rate and review their exes. It’s kind of like a Yelp for the Men of New York. It was created as a way for women to rate and review the men of New York. To warn other women against the bad guys and give thumbs up for the good ones.

Reed McMahon is a PR Rep for one of the big PR firms in New York. His job is to turn his client’s image around when they’re down in the dumps and he’s worked his ass off to be one of the top reps for his firm. He’s good at what he does and he’s made a good life for himself working there. He dates a lot but hasn’t settled down and honestly has no plans on settling down with anyone. He’s got his reasons for this and those reasons are pretty legit reasons but did that matter to the women that reviewed him on the Bad Bachelor’s App? Nope. Not one bit. Reed is annoyed that his personal life has been made the topic of girls night out dinners all over New York but it’s an annoyance that he can ignore…until it starts creeping into every aspect of his life. Until it starts messing with his work, with his family, and the new relationship that he didn’t even know he wanted. When he starts working with a local librarian to try to save the library that she works for, as a favor to his assistant, things really heat up for Reed.

Darcy is working with Reed to save her library from ruin. She needs to raise money to save programs, to fix up the building and everything else that comes with working at a public library. She’s busy enough as it is, she doesn’t need to be attracted to the more notorious bachelor in the city but the more time she spends with Reed, the more she starts to realize that maybe Bad Bachelor’s got it wrong this time around. Reed isn’t the person that these women are reviewing. He’s so much more than that and the more she gets to know him, the worse she feels for the way that the app is messing with his life.

I will say that London’s writing style is easy to follow along with because I really enjoyed the romance that blossomed between Darcy and Reed. I enjoyed getting to know them on their own and seeing them get to know each other. Their relationship blossomed in a believable way and I was happy to see them develop feelings for each other. Sure, they weren’t perfect but to me, not being perfect is actually pretty perfect but as much as I enjoyed these two and seeing them fall for each other, I had such a hard time with the whole Bad Bachelor thing.

It took me so long to read this book because I kept having to walk away from the story to calm my ass down because of the whole thing with Reed and the Bad Bachelor App. Without giving too much away, Reed finds out who is behind the app when the app started messing with his life. It’s never mentioned that Reed was a cheater or that he abused any of the women that he slept with. He never even lied to these women. He was upfront about what they were doing and so I thought it was pretty unfair that his life was flipped upside down because of hurt feelings. So Reed finds out who’s behind the app and the lack of remorse that she showed Reed and the shitshow his life became because of her app left me with a bad taste in my mouth. I didn’t like the way that that part of the story ended and because of that, it tainted my enjoyment of the overall story.

It always comes back to this for me…

Your crappy childhood isn’t an excuse to be a crappy person. Your crappy luck with relationships isn’t an excuse to be a crappy person. Your crappy experiences aren’t an excuse to be a crappy person. We all have our crap, and you can either let it define you or grow from it.

I’m just about done with the second book in this series and I don’t even know how I’m going to get through book 3 because ugh, the shitty shit show is still going strong and the woman behind it all just keeps getting deeper and deeper on my shit list. So while the romance was pretty great and the characters were wonderful, the Bad Bachelors app is a huge part of this story and that shit was not okay with me so I can’t give this book more than 3 stars. I just can’t do it.

Grade: 3 out of 5

Bad Bachelors

three-half-stars


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