In the midst of scrambling to finish my two reading challenges for the year, I needed something else. So I reached for Beard Science, which I'd been hanging onto for a rainy day, because I wanted to read Cletus' story! While one of my reading challenges is a romance one, this book doesn't fit any of my remaining categories in it, and so it was still a separate treat from scrambling to finish the challenge books.This was the book I was most looking forward to in the Winston Brothers series (though, to be fair, the series hasn't been completed yet). Cletus was clearly the oddball in the first few books (including Beauty and the Mustache) and I thought he would be a very intriguing hero. Additionally, I was looking for the hidden depths that there must be to Jennifer, the heroine, aka the Banana Cake Queen. Ultimately, I got what I wanted on one front but not on the other.
The plot kicks off when Jennifer's parents, who dominate her entire life despite her being a grown woman, inform her that they have people coming down to talk to her about a cooking show and promotion opportunities with Chiquita, which Jennifer definitely doesn't want. She's been forced into a mold her entire life because she doesn't want to displease her mother, but what she really wants is to be her own person. So when she accidentally catches Cletus on film in the act of stealing evidence from the police department, she decides to blackmail him into helping her find a guy to marry so she can have an easy way to leave her parents. Why does she pick Cletus for this? Because Jennifer is an observant person, partially because people don't think she has a single brain cell and say things in front of her they probably wouldn't in front of other people, and she knows that Cletus gets up to all kinds of mischief. Why this makes a good husband hunter, I'm not sure I know, but hey, it's the plot. Of course, over the course of the hunt, the two grow closer...
Jennifer did end up having hidden depths, and a backbone that she just didn't know how to show before. I liked her; she proceeded with things in a logical manner, didn't get into trouble trying to do things the hard way, and was open about what she wanted. Cletus, on the other hand, was somewhat of a disappointment. Being inside his head wasn't nearly as interesting as I thought it would be; it seems like, when Reid elevated Cletus from supporting character to hero, he lost a lot of the zaniness that made him special in the process. We can still see that he has some schemes, but none of them seem as kooky or complicated as they did when viewed by the characters in previous books; some are just downright pranks instead of any sort of actual scheming like we've been told again and again Cletus is prone to. Seeing more of Billy, a character who hasn't been on the page much in the past few books, was also nice, setting him up for his own book in the near future. (Though we have to get through Duane first.)
The writing overall was pretty good; I think Reid writes really good chemistry, and that wasn't any different here. But she does tend to lose track of minor threads and details throughout the course of the book; for example, one of the guys visiting from New York to check out Jennifer for a cooking show has his name changed from Allen to Alan and back again, twice, within the span of three pages. The plot with the Iron Wraiths is also starting to get pretty far-fetched and overdrawn, and I wish Reid had wrapped it up already; I don't see how she can possibly drag this on for three more books!
Overall, a good read, and one that I would definitely read again, as with most of Reid's books. However, it wasn't what I was hoping for, falling more in line with the previous books instead of blowing them out of the water.
4 stars out of 5.
No comments:
Post a Comment