Review - Married by Mistake

This review is so late I basically missed a review, and for that I apologize.  I've actually been caught up doing Camp Nanowrimo, that is to say, I've been writing a new book and realized that there was a Nano event going on a few days after I started.  So I've been writing like a maniac and unfortunately that means that all of my other projects have suffered.  But this blog has been the first thing to go since always, so at least I'm predictable, if nothing else.

This review is of Married by Mistake, by Abby Gaines.  In all fairness I read the book last week and should have written a review then, but since I use reading these books as a way of procrastination from writing my own and writing my own as procrastination from writing reviews, some of the details have slipped my mind.

So there's there's this woman, right?

Just kidding.

Casey signs up for a reality show where women put their potential grooms on the spot to propose on live TV, which actually sounds like it could be a reality show in real life.  I'm a little surprised it's not.  She gets dumped, the guy who owns the station has to do something, so he marries her, they don't know that the marriage is real, and they're stuck pretending to be a happy couple for a month until they can get an anullment.  Female lead grows and learns to be selfish (in a good way?), male lead grows and learns to have emotions and they're both happy and still married at the end of the book.

The chick starts out as a pushover and her man teaches her that it's necessary to think about yourself every once in a while, and while I think that's an excellent lesson and one I myself can relate to intimitely, it took me years to change and this woman completely changes everything about her personality in about a week and a half.  I just made that up, it could have been two weeks.  Less than a month.  I like the lesson that you can change, I resent it being presented as happening so easily.  Casey gets everything that she wants from the beginning to the end, including a wonderful romance (where the male lead adores her, even though at the beginning he tells her that it's a teenage fairy tale to want to be loved that way, and I agree with him) and even a little side blurb that she's writing a young adult novel and it's finished, edited, and sold in the month that they're living together.  I think that was particularly unnecessary, and even maybe a little bit of author insertion.  Nothing happens so easily.  Not change, not love, not selling books.

I guess the male lead is also so rich that he gets reporters and paparazzi surrounding his house and writing about how their marriage might not be real, and even lying to get jobs as maids.  The legality of that seems a little fishy, but since the whole thing about their marriage being real and them being unable to easily get an anullment also strikes me so it's just par for the course of the book.  There's just so much about this book that screams 'fake!' to me.  How easily she forgets about a man she's been with since high school.  How much of a sham their relationship was in the first place in order to make her relationship with male lead seem so much richer and fuller.

The book is fluff, and I know I shouldn't expect too much of it, but when I went to amazon and found it still the top book after a week of me not checking I'm a little disappointed.  It's just another book where a perfect woman gets everything she wants from a rich man who falls madly in love with her and everything's perfect.  I didn't like the side romances, either.  Sam and what's-her-face didn't have anything in common before, and there was only the beginnings of an attaction there because she finally notices that he's handsome.  Gag me with a spoon!  That's not the basis of a relationship!  Then she's a bitch and he grows a spine and everything is happy ever after.  Wait, what?

If you can't tell, I thought this book was dumb.  The problems weren't really problems, the drama was fake, and the people were faker.  Is that a word?  More fake?  Anyways.  The only thing that I did actually like about it was the relationship between Casey and her mother in law.  They actually had a good thing going and I liked how they became actual friends over the course of the book.  Otherwise, it was pretty awful.  Three stars, because the writing wasn't that bad, not really, I just expect more from a story.

Because this is still the top selling book I'm going to have to go with the second choice, which is actually not a romance, thank God.  But it is religious, and we'll see how that goes.  I hope it's good.  The book in question is The Apostle: The Life of Paul, by John Pollock.  That should be up by tomorrow because this one is running so late, I'll try to get myself back on my self imposed schedule.  See you then, thanks for stopping by!