In general, I’m not a romance reader. I just haven’t had much success with the genre— I have a few favourites, but by and large, I remain bored and unimpressed with romance/new adult/contemporary/chick lit. Which basically means that I’m now on a quest to find a romance novel I do thoroughly enjoy. My favourite book leans heavily on romance, so I figure, it can’t all be bad, right?
Years ago, I tried Christina Lauren’s Beautiful Bastard series. I never made it past the first book (I never even finished the first book), but people who hated that series were praising the author duo’s Wild Seasons series. It was like a completely different experience, apparently. Not just smutty PTP (pulled-to-publish) fiction (the Beautiful Bastard series started out as Twilight fanfiction on a community website) that lacked a cohesive plot and tried to make up for it with mindless smut. Romance, I will sometimes try. Erotica is usually a non-starter.
Hesitant, but hoping for the best, I ordered the first book in the Wild Seasons series, Sweet Filthy Boy.
In Sweet Filthy Boy, we follow college graduate Mia Holland, as she embarks on a road trip with her two lifelong best friends to Vegas. Mia’s trip— her whole summer— marks the end of life as she knows it: she’ll be attending business school in the fall to please her impossibly pernicious father, her only avenue for a successful future after a leg injury that squashed her dreams of being a professional ballerina.
Well, as they say: what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, and… I bet you can all see where this is going, right?
While in Sin City, Mia meets deliciously attractive Frenchman Ansel Guillaume, and after (what’s supposed to be) one night of fun, ends up with a roaring hangover, a ring on her finger, and a new last name. Against all reason, Ansel convinces Mia to come back with him to France, and experience a new, forever kind of freedom: far away from the pressures of business school and her family.
Mia agrees on the condition that it’s all playing pretend: slipping into different roles, pretending to be a more careless, more confident woman, is how she thrives. She figures she’ll have a sexy vacation with a sexy stranger and then head back home, where the rest of her boring life awaits. Ansel has always been honest about his real feelings for Mia, and he takes their marriage seriously. When what was supposed to be a breezy summer fling turns into a life-changing romance, Mia must make a choice: keep pretending, even to herself, and go back to the familiar, or take the biggest risk of her life and choose something new.
I’ll say one thing for Sweet Filthy Boy right off the bat. Everyone who praised it for being a completely different beast than the Beautiful series is right; this book has more heart, more depth, and plenty of fluff to offset the smut. The authors did a fantastic job describing the sights and sounds of France, and if you can’t actually afford a vacation but want to be whisked away, Sweet Filthy Boy might just scratch that itch.
Listen: I liked it. But that’s pretty much it. It was better than a lot of other offerings from its genre, but I’m incredibly picky with romance novels, and this just didn’t wow me.
Sweet Filthy Boy, at least, lives up to its name. Ansel is an ever-patient sweetheart, determined to be with Mia even when she has to pretend to be someone else (a sexy maid or a minion of the devil) just to have a decent conversation with him. He’s also definitely filthy, dubbing Mia “Cerise” (cherry) before their hasty wedding vows. Ansel was a nice change of pace from broody, angry, closed off alpha male leads. Five stars for Ansel and all of his slick moves.
Mia, however, is a whole other story. Honestly, I think I would have liked her a lot more if this book had been halved; her insecurity and doubts about her life and her marriage worked to a point and then became monotonous and frustrating. Honestly, I started skimming most of the smut in the back half because it was pretty much stemming from the same place: Mia doesn’t know how to communicate with this guy she agreed to marry, and so she dons a sexy costume and decides to go the roleplay route every single damn time she needs or wants a connection with him. I get it, you’re a talented actress and feel woefully inadequate and scared: try therapy, this guy is literally letting you live in his fancy apartment rent-free, maybe when he asks you a question, you could answer it and then jump his bones the normal way instead of staying trapped inside your head for a handful of pages and dressing up like an anime character to try and make him forget that he’s in love with you.
But. C’est la vie.
Eventually, though, I did grudgingly respect Mia. In the end, she made changes to her own life, for her own life that didn’t revolve around anyone else’s happiness but hers, and grew a backbone. It happened, it just happened too slowly for my tastes.
Still, I liked Sweet Filthy Boy enough to order the next book in the series, Dirty Rowdy Thing (following Mia’s best friend Harlow and Ansel’s best friend Finn. I haven’t started reading it yet, but full disclosure: of the characters in Sweet Filthy Boy, Harlow and Finn both competed for the title of least favourite).
But that’s for next week’s column!
In the meantime, inspired by Ansel’s nickname for his beloved, here’s a recipe for cherry crepes, which look fantastic.
Try the recipe (or the book) and let us know what you think!
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