Build a Man (Talli Roland)

Summary:
Serenity is an American in London for the first time. She found a job at a Botox clinic, and started hooking up with the doctor. She moved in with Peter, and has been living with him for nearly all of her stay in London so far. She's a budding writer, hoping to get into the world of tabloid writing. Yes, really. She pitches story after Botox-related story to the London tabloids she adores, getting shot down every single time. But when Jeremy walks into the office for a complete overhaul, she knows this is her time. She sends a pitch about a man going under the knife to every tabloid she can think of, including the Daily Planet (yup, Roland ripped off Superman's day job and made it a tabloid), the biggest, raunchiest tabloid paper of them all. She lands the column, writing for free in the hopes that she'll get the staff job that's opening up at the Planet. If she does a great job with her column, called Build a Man (shocker!), the job is hers. But she can't tell Jeremy she's writing the story, nor Peter, and she'll be writing under a pseudonym so she's not found out. Piece of cake!

Thoughts:
Ugh. Seriously. UGH. This book is not worth the download time, let alone the price it might cost you. (A measly 99 cents for the Kindle as of this writing. I downloaded it when it was free, thank God.) As a product of the Fan Fiction world, I've read some roiling piles of crap before. This is one of them. One of the terms from that world that has stuck with me is the "Mary Sue." A Mary Sue is a character that is very much like the author, and she's thrown into a fandom world like the Potter series or the Lord of the Rings series, and she's paired with the most attractive of the series' characters, as though Harry Potter would turn up his nose at Ginny Weasley in favor of Mary Sue Smith, an American transfer student that showed up in the middle of fifth year. Why, of course! (The male equivalent was "Gary Stew/Stu," if I recall correctly.) I bring all this up because the Serenity character is so very much a Mary Sue, she's even NAMED horribly. Serenity is one of those names that you only WISH you could have, because it's so pretty and wonderful... So very Mary-Sue-ish. Oh, and the worst part is that when I checked the Amazon website to see exactly how many crappy pages this sad, slow, horrible death of a book were, I read the words that confirmed my Mary Sue suspicions in the "From the Author" section: "This novel holds a special place in my heart, since the main character, Serenity, experiences many of the same feelings I did when I first moved to England from Canada. Everything seemed so different and strange, yet exciting -- a whole new world of potential opening up. Like Serenity, I also worked as a receptionist in a place where London's wealthy women flocked for Botox, and I couldn't help being shocked at the amount of money they shelled out each visit." She openly admits to the Mary-Sue-dom of the story, and is completely unapologetic about it, even going on to say that she identifies with the character's feelings. Hello!! You wrote the damn thing! Of course you identify with it! This book is entirely predictable. Of course she's going to get the guy in the end. She's the book heroine. It doesn't matter that she wrote a story about him without his knowledge, or that she made him a laughing stock, or that because he went under the knife, (despite having serious reservations on the day of the surgery) he wound up having some brain damage. None of that matters, because they love each other and love will out in the end. Oh yes. That she lied to him through most of their existence together is no big deal, right? Ugh. And somehow, this book actually got a sequel. So not even bothering! DO NOT waste your time on this pile of horse manure unless you're only out for annoying protagonists who wound up getting a happy ending, no matter how horrible a person she is, or if you're looking for the stupidest, most predictable plot line that hundreds of romance writers have followed for decades. SKIP IT!

Book 57 of 70

Pages: 308, read as an e-book
Genre: chick lit, romance
Grade: F-
Would I Recommend?: No. Don't even waste the download time when the book is free. Seriously. Don't bother.