While trawling Penny Reid's titles on Amazon (I was hoping for an omnibus of her Chemistry books for Kindle, but no such luck at this point in time) I came across a series she'd co-written with L. H. Cosway in which the heroes all appear to be rugby players. Intriguing. So of course I bought the first book and went off. The story here follows Ronan Fitzpatrick, a rugby player who is spending time in New York after being suspended from his team for beating up a teammate, who happened to sleep with Ronan's girlfriend and brag about it. And then there's the heroine, Annie, who is almost a recluse. She runs a blog about poorly-dressed celebrities under the moniker of "the Socialmedialite" while also working as a reputation fixer at a New York firm where she avoids going into the office as much as possible. And then Annie's boss assigns her to work on cleaning up Ronan's reputation, because Ronan pretty much demands it after he lays eyes on her--not knowing that she's the one that tore him apart in a post on her blog earlier in the week and consequently received a very nasty email response from him. Oops.Ronan proceeds to begin sexually harassing Annie immediately despite her repeatedly indicating she doesn't want anything to do with it. This immediately struck me as strange because that is so not up Penny Reid's alley. And then I looked at what else L. H. Cosway had written and saw Six of Hearts. And things suddenly made much more sense. But I forged on ahead! Soon, Annie and Ronan's attraction (because Annie is attracted to Ronan, even though she is distinctly not looking for a relationship of any type with anyone, at least not in the physical world) lands them with pictures of them kissing in the press and paparazzi following them everywhere...even though apparently no one in the US knew who Ronan was until this exact moment and now they are all crazy about him. (?) And then Annie is congratulated on her plan to make Ronan's image better by making it look like they're dating, and they're off! Oh dear.
This was not as good of a collaboration as I would have hoped. The continuity is a bit scattered and the main conflict of the book--Annie trying to hide her Socialmedialite identity while Ronan pretends he doesn't know about it--is pretty flimsy at best. Considering that Annie's boss basically lays it all out in a few sentences at the end of the book, it's pretty evident that both characters were reacting immaturely. The plot is jazzed up with the conflict with the paparazzi, which again didn't really make sense as long as they were in the US--I can understand it when they were in Ireland, but I don't think I could name a single European sports star other than David Beckham, and he's not even current anymore, so him being stalked as famous in the US was not really something I bought into. They try to throw in some light BDSM to spice things up and have something that can make Ronan look like a monster, but that doesn't really work out either--though I wish I'd known about this book when I'd been trying to fulfill the BDSM category for my romance reading challenge!
Ronan and Annie definitely get cuter as the book goes on, but they suck at using their words and miscommunication is the central conflict in their relationship, which is a trope that I pretty much hate. They sometimes act more like children than adults, completely shutting down not because they are incapable of conveying their feelings, but because they just don't want to. A few lines of dialogue could have solved this at pretty much any point in the book, but of course that would have made everything be over too quickly.
Overall, I liked this, but not as much as I wanted to. I think this is an interesting start to a series but the way Ronan dives into Annie by totally harassing her rubs me the wrong way. I think this is Cosway's hand in the book rather than Reid's...though there was that start to the Knitting in the City series... Hm. Anyway, I'm willing to give the second one a chance, but maybe this is a collaboration that was better off not happening.
2.5 stars out of 5.
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