by Craig Dirkes
rating:☆
published: 1st May 2017
spoilers? yes
Goodreads
Galley provided by publisher
I was really looking forward to this one - the premise sounded like it could be good and I was hoping for some murder mystery type story. Did I get that? Not in the least.
The prologue had me hyped. Eddie was being shot at by some mysterious stranger, for some mysterious reason, so naturally I was intrigued.
The rest of the book? Was a bit of a disappointment, to be honest.
The plot, essentially, goes like this. Eddie Ashford flunks out of college. To get back in, or at least have a chance of getting back in, he heads out to the arse-end of nowhere, Alaska, to work in a newspaper. There, he meets this girl (we'll get to her in a moment). Said girl rejects him, at which point he decides he absolutely has to get out of the place. Because he's been rejected. (I don't get it either.) But he doesn't have the money. So what does he start to do? He starts smuggling weed. But, there is, in the arse-end of nowhere, Alaska, an, if not thriving, then extensive, bootlegging trade. And he manages to step on the toes of some of the major players, and wind up in trouble.
So. Not a murder mystery.
My major problem with this book was how the narrator talked about women (or rather, one woman, Taylor, the one who rejects him). To start with, he says (on first seeing her):
Ho. Lee. Shit.
Standing there might have been the hottest girl I'd seen. Ever. Anywhere. On TV, in person, in a magazine, in a movie, on a billboard. My ding dong went from zero to boner faster than a car's airbag can deply. I untucked my red flannel shirt to hide it.
The girl looked exotic. I couldn't pinpoint her lineage. Whatever she was, it amounted to a luscious mishmash of every female physical characteristic I held dear. Tall? Check. Long, straight blond hair? Check. Olive skin? Check. Pouty lips? Check. Hint of a buttchin? Check. Big bombs? Che - actually I couldn't tell. The light blue sweater she wore was too bulky. But with how perfect the rest of her was, it was fair to assume she was holding a nice rack of sleeper boobs under there.
Charming, right? But wait. It continues.
They get into emailing each other, as friends, or at least on her part. He on the other hand, is only in it for sex. He calls her emails boring, when they are telling him about her, because they aren't flirty. He "sees red" when she talks to another guy, even though they are just friends, even though he is nothing to her. Then she rejects him, and there comes the part where he wants to get out. Because she just wants to be friends with him.
Next comes this guy's "pussy complex". I am just as baffled as you are. He explains it like so,
I'd always had a major pussy complex. It all started when I was little, watching my dad and Max do guy stuff I wasn't mentally or physically capable of doing. They fixed cars, landscaped, finished basements - you name it. Growing up in Zimmerman never did my complex any favours, because every guy was a hard-ass. They knocked my dick in the dirt ever time a story of mine printed in the junior high school newspaper. Writing was art, and art was for pussies.
Lovely.
But I endured more. Even as every sexist quote made me want to tear my eyeballs out, and burn a copy of this book in effigy (which would have been quite hard given it's an ebook, but I would have found a way).
But wait now. A steam? With Taylor? And Bristy and Hope? With them naked? With me naked? Was this a joke? A mom suggesting that a horny and half-hard-already me strip down with her gorgeous daughter, inside a tiny, hot, steamy dark room?
This comes after he gets rejected, when he decides actually being friends could be OK. Because he's a sleazeball. Next is,
The girl of my dreams was sitting five feet in front of my face, naked. No bra. No panties. No nothing. Not even a bracelet around her wrist. Naked.
Insta-bone. I got the biggest one I'd ever had. It grew so tall, so fast, I thought it might smack my chin like an uppercut.
Boys are gross.
Thankfully, after this point there wasn't much more I objected to, and the last 50 pages actually saw the story pick up a bit. Too bad that couldn't make up for the previous 300.
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