69 Million Things I Hate About You
Release date: October 9th 2017
Genres: Adult, Contemporary, Romance
Pages: 255
Format: eBook
Source: Entangled
I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.
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Star rating:Heat rating:
After personal assistant Kiersten Abbott wins sixty-nine million dollars in the lotto, she suddenly has more than enough money to quit her impossibly demanding job. But where’s the fun in that? She decides to stay and exact a little revenge on her insufferable ass of a boss.
Billionaire Cole Harrington quickly figures out something’s afoot with his usually agreeable personal assistant. When he finds out about the office pool betting on how long it’ll take him to fire her, he decides to spice things up and see how far he can push her until she quits.
The game is on, with everyone waiting to see who will crack first. But the bet sparks a new dynamic between them, and soon they realize they just might have crossed that fine line between hate and love.
The Faerie Queen’s review
If you want pure fluff, ok, you can read this. I mean, I did sort of enjoy the book. But I couldn’t help thinking while reading that there were a lot of other, better books. This was so formulaic and lazy that I’m sure I could have gotten the same romance kick and more elsewhere.
Let’s start with the easiest thing. This book was rushed. Yeah, you could say it was a “quick read”, but really, it just wasn’t very developed. Right from the beginning, I felt like only the bare minimum was thrown in to get the plot going. No time was taken to really let us know who the various characters were, what their lives were like, etc. But hey, I very quickly learned about Bossman Cole…
Without any scene-setting, the book started with Cole’s assistant quitting because he wouldn’t let her take the weekend off to get married. Something she’d told him about months in advance. His excuse was that she knew what the job involved. I’m sorry, but that is no excuse. And no, giving her a decent severance package was no excuse for being a dick in the first place! In fact, it felt like the whole book was about the author trying to show that hey, Cole isn’t such a bad guy because he cared about a female relative! Basically, it was that whole “because I have a mom, I care about women’s rights” argument that some men use to distract from their sexist behaviour. And Cole (and his friends) were pretty gross, honestly. No swooning over them here. And no love for the sexual harassment in the workplace either.
Kiersten was better, and honestly, she is the reason this book got two stars. I enjoyed all the things that Kiersten did to Cole. I wish the characters, including side characters, had been more fully developed so I could really enjoy the humour of the scenes, as there was a lot of potential there. Kiersten deserved so much better than a man who was only interested in attractive rich women. Because that’s really all we got from Cole about her.
The end was superficially sweet, but with so much rushing, it was more telling than showing that they’d fallen for each other. I just never felt the chemistry, aside from a few moments of purely physical interactions. They just didn’t click with each other or me, so the ending fell flat. And also seemed like a cop-out to make Cole look like a Good Guy. Ugh.
So sure, I gave it two stars, but would I recommend it? Nope. There are better books. Like Breathless, the last book I read. Now that was good, with physical, mental, and emotional chemistry. Read that instead.
About Kira Archer
Kira Archer lives in Pennsylvania with her hubs and two kids. And 3 ridiculous cats. She's one of those people who laughs at inappropriate moments (especially overly emotional occasions like weddings or funerals), and she has an insanely overactive imagination which is great when she's writing but not so great when she's shutting all the lights off at night and then has to go up the stairs. She has a PhD in Procrastination (or would if there was such a thing and there soooo should be because she's seriously at expert level here). And if she's not writing, she's reading, or thinking about reading or writing. And running her kids around because they are busy and she's the taxi driver. She also writes historical romances as Michelle McLean.
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