Tag: Nikol’s Reviews

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

Posted March 12, 2009 by Rowena in Reviews | 1 Comment

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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Tagged: 3.0 Reviews, Cheryl Robinson, Chick Lit, Guest Reviews, Nikol's Reviews, Penguin, Reviews

Guest Review: Lucky Chica by Berta Platas.

Posted February 18, 2009 by Rowena in Reviews | 3 Comments

Nikol’s review of Lucky Chica by Berta Platas.

Hero: Brad Merritt
Heroine: Rosie Caballero
Grade: 4.5 out of 5

Rosie Caballero hates her nagging boss, her “ditch-me” dating history, her second-hand wardrobe and third-rate job–nothing is easy. She can’t even afford to pay for her dog Tootie’s food.

And then, Rosie wins the largest lottery jackpot ever: 600 million. Rosie can hardly believe her new life: she spends thousands on diamonds, makeup, clothes, and promises. Rosie parties like a celebrity—and even meets the hottest actor on the planet, Brad Merritt, who sweeps her off her feet and seems to good to be true. But he’s not the only one in her dizzying world—former boyfriends, larcenous advisors, paparazzi all swarm around her, vying for her attention (and money).

In between shopping sprees and photo shoots, Rosie has to find out who she trusts—and what money can (and just can’t) buy.

What a fun book this turned out to be. I’ve never read anything by this author before and when I saw that Wena got this book, I immediately wanted it. The cover is cute and the synopsis on the back seemed pretty good so I dug right in.

I liked the book right from the very beginning. This book is about Rosie Caballero. Rosie is a receptionist who wins the $600 million lottery. Yes, you read that right; $600 million. Because she’s a nice person with only two living relatives, she shares her bounty with both her grandmother and her cousin, Cheeto. You read that right too, his damn name was Cheeto…like Cheetos the Chips. And her last name was Caballero, like that one Donald Duck song, “We’re three caballeros, three gay caballeros, they say we are birds of a feather….” Haha. I’m telling you, reading their names in this book alone was enough to make me laugh.

But all laughing aside, this book was too cute for words. So after Rosie wins the lottery, she splits it with her grandma and Cheeto. After taxes, they all got approximately $100 million each. That’s still a lot of cheese to have and they immediately rise to rock star status. Paparazzi is snapping their pictures everywhere they go and TMZ-like reporters are reporting on every little thing that they do.

It’s funny how different all three of them are. Grandma used her money to pay off all of her friends medical bills and then takes them all on a four week cruise. Cheeto uses his money to buy himself a hummer and then he buys all of his friends cars and then he lives the life of a party boy, jetting to Vegas every weekend and all of that madness. Rosie, who doesn’t really have any friends takes her dog shopping. They get makeovers and she buys some jewelry from Tiffany’s. While she’s out and about, she runs into Brad frickin’ Merritt. The A-list Actor that Rosie has been in love with forEVER.

They are formally introduced at a party and Rosie’s infatuation for Brad grows with the each hour that she spends in his company. Brad is just as smitten with Rosie as she is with him. Before the night is over, Brad tries to seduce Rosie but Rosie doesn’t let her passion run away with her. She wasn’t raised in this spotlight, loose morals kind of life. She is different from anyone that Brad’s ever encountered before and what I really liked about Rosie is that even though her life has drastically changed, not all of it was good and she kept her head about her while she stumbled along trying to adjust to her new life.

Watching, Brad and Rosie fall for each other made for some good reading and everything that came out of Cheeto’s mouth had me laughing my guts out. I really enjoyed this book and would recommend this book to anyone who wants to read a hysterical story about how money doesn’t automatically mean problems solved. It usually brings about more problems that make your head hurt and makes you want to hunt for blood. It’s a laugh out loud story that I enjoyed and I would definitely like to read more from this author.

This book is available from St. Martin’s Press. You can buy it here.

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Tagged: 4.5 Reviews, Berta Platas, Chick Lit, Nikol's Reviews, Reviews, St. Martin's Press

Review: Tall Tales and Wedding Veils by Jane Graves.

Posted June 24, 2008 by Rowena in Reviews | 5 Comments

This book was read and reviewed by my friend at work, Nikol. She absolutely loved this book and had this to say about the book…

…read on for her review.

Hero: Tony McCaffrey
Heroine: Heather Montgomery
Grade: 5 out of 5

Accountant Heather Montgomery is a planner. So never in her wildest dreams did she think she’d run into sexy charmer Tony McCaffrey in Vegas, play lady luck, and celebrate his jackpot with a champagne-soaked night. And she certainly never expected to wake up the next morning married! How could this good girl pick a man whose fridge is empty and whose apartment is a disaster zone, yet still drives her so crazy with lust she can’t see straight?

Quickly hitched and happily ditched, Tony can’t wait to get back to his playboy ways. But when Heather’s family is thrilled that their no-nonsense daughter is finally in love, he proposes a plan: stay married for a month to repay his good luck charm, even though she sterilizes his toothbrush and forbids anything between the sheets. But Heather is more than he bargained for–a sharp-witted, passionate woman who just might turn his near miss into wedded bliss!

Heather is a CPA from Plano, Texas. She doesn’t have much of a life. She invests most of her time into her work and she’s a Plain Jane. Her best friend’s name is Alison and they kick up their shoes at McMillians, which is a neighborhood bar. She hasn’t dated anyone in 6 months and she’s stressing over her cousin Regina’s wedding because she’s stuck wearing a hideous salmon colored bridesmaid dress. She’s intimidated by Regina because Regina loves to throw how well she’s doing in life in Heather’s face and she’s getting pressured by her Mother to marry soon cause she wants to be a grandmother.

Tony McCaffrey used to be a Repo Man before he bought his dream bar, McMillians. He’s one of those sex me lookin’ guys, he loves women…especially tall blondes with big breasts. He’s a party boy, your typical frat boy who loves to eat, drink and have plenty of wild monkey sex and has looks to kill. His dream is to buy McMillians but he doesn’t have the funds to do it and so he goes to Vegas to try to win some money to buy his damn bar but comes up short until he runs into Heather. Now Heather knows who Tony is from McMillians and she thinks he’s hella hot but knows that she doesn’t stand a chance with him because she’s not hella hot like him.

On a bridal trip to Vegas with Regina and her posse of bridesmaids, Heather sees her hottie from the neighborhood bar, Tony and one thing led to another and Heather wins the $20,000 that Tony needs to buy his dream bar. Because she’s smitten and stupid, she turns over the money to Tony and they celebrate in the back of a limo with a bottle of champange. Once the sun goes up, they realized that a) they got really drunk b) they got really married and c) they got seriously married, which was totally out of character for the uptight Heather. She tells her mother what happens and comes home to work on getting an annulment only to find out that her Mother spilled the beans to the entire family and because Tony is a gentleman and Heather did win him the money to get his bar, he decides to go along with the story of them being married so Heather and her mother wouldn’t look like fools to the family, Regina included.

Heather moves in with Tony to keep up the charade and it’s pretty obvious what happens after…they fall in love. This story isn’t a new story. We’ve read plenty of stories where the hero and the heroine drunkenly get married and they pretend to be an actual couple to save face and they end up falling in love with each other on the way. I’ve read this book before and I’ve seen this movie but I still enjoyed the heck out of this particular book. I still laughed myself silly through out a huge chunk of this book and I still hecka enjoyed this story. Heather cracked me up just as much as Tony did and the things these two got into was just a delightfully funny treat! This book is fun and is the perfect summer read.

Ya’ll should definitely check this book out. You won’t be sorry, I’m still laughing over things that happened in the story. It was that good, go forth and read it and thank me later. 🙂

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