Official Review: Heart's Desires by Kasey Martin
Posted: 16 May 2017, 01:19
[Following is an official OnlineBookClub.org review of "Heart's Desires" by Kasey Martin.]
1 out of 4 stars
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Heart’s Desires is an interracial romance between Charlene ‘Charlie’ Heart, an accountant working at a high-end nightclub in Dallas, and Jake Cameron, a former Special Forces soldier now running a private investigations firm. The two protagonists are already acquainted since their cousins Korri and Tony, who featured in the author’s previous book Designer Desires, are engaged to be married. Korri, in particular, is very keen for Charlie and Jake to get together and spends much of her time matchmaking the pair.
The book opens with a fight scene between unnamed protagonists, so it is evident from the beginning that there will be a suspense sub-plot. This comes into play when Lorenzo, the owner of the club where Charlie works, asks her to do some forensic accounting on the club’s records. At the same time, Jake’s company is asked by the FBI to assist in looking into the operations of Lorenzo’s cousin, a mobster who has moved to Dallas from New Jersey.
While this suspense sub-plot is consistent and holds together well, leading up to a solid conclusion, I felt that the book itself was not well-written. The book’s language was stilted and the dialogue felt very unnatural. I have no objection to interracial romances being told in a realistic way, and I am all for people of color telling their own stories, but Charlie never experiencing any racism as a black woman dating a white man seemed extremely unrealistic.
The author seems to have fallen into the classic trap of ‘telling rather than showing’. There were several unwieldy information dumps, flashbacks telling us all about Charlie and Jake’s dating pasts and the reason why they were both afraid of commitment, and an extremely confusing timeline. At one point the author set up for them to go out on a date, down to describing Charlie’s makeup, and then just completely skipped over the date itself to ‘tell’ the reader that they had a wonderful time. There was constant head-hopping from Charlie to Jake and back again, often within the same scene, to the point where it became extremely confusing.
The characters seemed flat and one-dimensional; every woman was black and beautiful, every man (apart from a token Black Best Friend) was white and gorgeous. There was a repetitive element where an attractive black woman would hit on Jake, Charlie got mad and called her a ‘heffa’ (sic) and, shortly afterward, an attractive white man would hit on Charlie, Jake got jealous and acted like a possessive caveman. After about the third repetition of this cycle, I honestly found myself rolling my eyes every time another character of the opposite sex even spoke to one of the protagonists because I knew what was coming.
Towards the end of the book, the author herself actually seemed to lose interest in the protagonists and spent a lot of time setting up a romance between Lorenzo and Chase who are apparently the protagonists in Chasing Desires, the next book in the series. In my opinion, this is poor practice; every book in a series should stand alone, from the meeting of the protagonists to any plots that have been set up being fully resolved. The suspense plot of Heart’s Desires was not really resolved despite the violent confrontation foreshadowed at the beginning of the book being played out, and it seems evident that anyone reading the next book without having read this one would be either thoroughly confused or forced to suffer through a huge info-dump to tell them what had happened in the previous story.
I don’t often struggle to finish a book, but this one really felt like wading through quicksand. I can’t in good conscience recommend it to anyone, and therefore I am awarding it one out of four stars.
******
Heart's Desires
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1 out of 4 stars
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Heart’s Desires is an interracial romance between Charlene ‘Charlie’ Heart, an accountant working at a high-end nightclub in Dallas, and Jake Cameron, a former Special Forces soldier now running a private investigations firm. The two protagonists are already acquainted since their cousins Korri and Tony, who featured in the author’s previous book Designer Desires, are engaged to be married. Korri, in particular, is very keen for Charlie and Jake to get together and spends much of her time matchmaking the pair.
The book opens with a fight scene between unnamed protagonists, so it is evident from the beginning that there will be a suspense sub-plot. This comes into play when Lorenzo, the owner of the club where Charlie works, asks her to do some forensic accounting on the club’s records. At the same time, Jake’s company is asked by the FBI to assist in looking into the operations of Lorenzo’s cousin, a mobster who has moved to Dallas from New Jersey.
While this suspense sub-plot is consistent and holds together well, leading up to a solid conclusion, I felt that the book itself was not well-written. The book’s language was stilted and the dialogue felt very unnatural. I have no objection to interracial romances being told in a realistic way, and I am all for people of color telling their own stories, but Charlie never experiencing any racism as a black woman dating a white man seemed extremely unrealistic.
The author seems to have fallen into the classic trap of ‘telling rather than showing’. There were several unwieldy information dumps, flashbacks telling us all about Charlie and Jake’s dating pasts and the reason why they were both afraid of commitment, and an extremely confusing timeline. At one point the author set up for them to go out on a date, down to describing Charlie’s makeup, and then just completely skipped over the date itself to ‘tell’ the reader that they had a wonderful time. There was constant head-hopping from Charlie to Jake and back again, often within the same scene, to the point where it became extremely confusing.
The characters seemed flat and one-dimensional; every woman was black and beautiful, every man (apart from a token Black Best Friend) was white and gorgeous. There was a repetitive element where an attractive black woman would hit on Jake, Charlie got mad and called her a ‘heffa’ (sic) and, shortly afterward, an attractive white man would hit on Charlie, Jake got jealous and acted like a possessive caveman. After about the third repetition of this cycle, I honestly found myself rolling my eyes every time another character of the opposite sex even spoke to one of the protagonists because I knew what was coming.
Towards the end of the book, the author herself actually seemed to lose interest in the protagonists and spent a lot of time setting up a romance between Lorenzo and Chase who are apparently the protagonists in Chasing Desires, the next book in the series. In my opinion, this is poor practice; every book in a series should stand alone, from the meeting of the protagonists to any plots that have been set up being fully resolved. The suspense plot of Heart’s Desires was not really resolved despite the violent confrontation foreshadowed at the beginning of the book being played out, and it seems evident that anyone reading the next book without having read this one would be either thoroughly confused or forced to suffer through a huge info-dump to tell them what had happened in the previous story.
I don’t often struggle to finish a book, but this one really felt like wading through quicksand. I can’t in good conscience recommend it to anyone, and therefore I am awarding it one out of four stars.
******
Heart's Desires
View: on Bookshelves
Like CaitlynLynch's review? Post a comment saying so!