Review: In Love With a Younger Man by Cheryl Robinson.

Nikol‘s review of In Love With a Younger Man by Cheryl Robinson.

Main Character: Oleana Day
Grade: 3 out of 5

An inspiring novel about taking risks and following your dreams from “one of the hottest fiction authors of today.”(Urban Reviews) At forty-three years old, Oleana Day feels restless. She just needs change, and a direction. She’s found it in Matthew Harper. He’s smart, financially stable, drop-dead sexy, and has no baggage. There’s just one problem-he’s 18 years younger, and he’s full of surprises. But what unfolds between them is something neither would have guessed-an unexpected romance about coming to terms, coming of age, and fighting for the love of your life.

I need to start this review by saying that I cannot sympathize with weak female characters. You know, those women who don’t have any self respect and stay with men that do them dirty all the damn time. They spend their nights crying over their men and they don’t woman up. It pisses me off when I read characters like this and when we first meet Oleana Day, I couldn’t sympathize with anything she went through because the bitch cried all the damn time.

Boo hoo, I have no friends, No one loves me – wahhh I’m all alone.

Blah. Get over it and sign your grown up papers already. That’s exactly how I felt while reading the first part of this book and that first part of the book is what dragged me down when reading it. I understand that we needed to see Oleana at her worst to appreciate the woman she grew up to be but for me, we spent too much damn time in the past that halfway through this book, I wanted to throw the damn thing at the wall and choke Oleana the hell out.

So this story…it’s about Oleana Day and her journey through life. We first meet Oleana when she’s 18 and her boyfriend just committed suicide and we see the toll that it takes on Oleana. Then we follow her to college where she meets Andrew, her boyfriend that she loved and played house with and just straight up acted a fool with because she’s failing her classes and gave up on the reason she was in college in the first place. For her education. We see her acting real dumb because she knew that Andrew was creeping on the side (hello, it’s called women’s intuition!) and still she looked past all of that and continued on. Then she gets pregnant with Andrews kids and he makes her have an abortion….and then the fool runs off with his other girlfriend and marries her, leaving Oleana’s ass in the dust.

Well…*shakes head* It’s really hard to sympathize with the mistakes that Oleana made in this book because after the whole Andrew debacle, you would think that she learned from her mistakes but she doesn’t because she ends up sleeping with a married man for SIX DAMN YEARS!

WTF?

I couldn’t understand it, I couldn’t relate to her and the more I read about her, the more pissed off I got while reading this book. I’ll tell you one thing; Cheryl Robinson sure knows how to write those characters that pop right off the pages of the book. Oleana is one of those characters. I may not have liked her when I first met her in this book but over the course of this book, she did stop being such a stupid ass and she did overcome everything that I hated but it took her too damn long to get it. I mean, hell she was 40 effing 3 years old and FINALLY she got it? I kept thinking, DAMN, I hope I’m not still actin’ a damn fool for no body when I turn 30 and this bitch is over 40. Talk about hard head.

So after a whole damn bunch of drama, we finally meet the two guys that want Oleana for …Oleana. The ones that aren’t after anything other than her company and just..her. The problem? Ones 12 years younger than her and the other is 18 years younger than her. Well, there are other problems too like one doesn’t want to give up his other tenderoni’s and the other one is well…got problems but these problems shot my problems with the rest of the book right out of the water and instead of not caring for the book and characters, I ended up rather liking them.

But man, her men were so much younger than her…I mean, 12 years and 18 years? Good God.

Like Smokey would say in Friday (the movie): DAAAAAMMMMNNNNNNN! Yeah, that’s exactly what I thought because man did that make her some kind of Cougar. Toward the end, the book really took off and that’s one of my major complaints with this story, it took a long time for Oleana to get to that place where she was finally doing right for herself but when she finally did, I ended up liking this story a whole lot more because of it.

I guess all in all, alls well that ends well but the journey was too damn long for me to sit through and even though I ended up thinking Oleana was cool, I was still too mad at her from the beginning to totally buy all the changes. Her own emotional baggage was too much to carry at times but I really did end up enjoying this book, I’m giving this book a 3 out of 5.

This book is available from Penguin. You can buy it here or here in e-format.

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