Title: My Billionaire Boss Surprise Baby
Author: Anita Shaw
Date: 2023
Publisher: Anita Shaw
Quote: "...but sometimes I wish I had a dad like the other kids."
Is this romance ever a fantasy. Emma has made a career of doing everything everyone's always advised young women not to do. She had a baby as a teenager, she kept him, she slept with another man while baby Max was just a tot and got dumped for the next baby-free woman he met, and now, here she goes again...taking a job as personal assistant to a rich man, and sleeping with him, even when the last woman he's used and dumped files a lawsuit.
And it's a romance, so we're supposed to believe this leads to happily-ever-after.
And it's worse than that. Every Booktober Blitz book can't be above average and this is one of the ones that's not. Romances are supposed to provide someone's insight into personal relationships, but in this one I got an impression that Anita Shaw never knew anyone for whom anything like this fictional relationship worked, or could have worked, or seemed to be working for a while. Characters aren't characterized; scenes don't show any reason why they'd be likely to feel the way we're told they do, except that this was the story a SEO search suggested readers would like and Shaw cranked out something like what she thought readers wanted. Emma's and Jack's friendship "had ups and downs"--but we don't see what those were. They just keep building up those emotions on cue and, y'know, the tension couldn't be ignored, because she's thinking Billionaire! and he's thinking Desperate Female Body! and before you know it, before the engagement's announced, Emma's pregnant again. Because we never see exactly what their business is but we do see them making babies in approved tasteful-romance-novel terms. But it's all right because they can "do" the wedding before it's really obvious, and six-year-old Max thinks it's interesting that Emma has the beginning of a baby bump when she sails off on her honeymoon...
For every book there's someone but I'm finding it hard to imagine who really wants this book. If you collect romance novels... If you just want to fantasize about premarital baby-making with a billionaire... If you're a man who wants to fantasize about being a billionaire, using and dumping desperate women, and finally feeling that your emotions and hormones have settled down (for the moment) on a woman who won't mind being alone with your baby when your hormone tide turns...yes, the ideal reader for this book would probably be a man. It's told from the woman's point of view, but this is a male fantasy.
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