Title: Waiting on the Billionaire
Author: Jenna Brandt
Date: 2018
Quote: "This wasn't her first 'no' but just one of a long string...She had only been working at the restaurant for a couple of months."
Isn't that a cute title? Lana is an aspiring actress who works in restaurants between jobs, so the story will involve her waiting on Bryce, the billionaire software developer.
Unfortunately the whole book is as careless as the quote. "She had only been working at the restaurant for a couple of months" is a snappy retort, perhaps to something like "Have you ever been in this restaurant?" Nobody in the story has said anything like that. "She had been working at the restaurant for only a couple of months" is the plain statement of the situation that fits into the story.
It goes on. Lana is a nice girl, whose little speech about not making babies before marriage is a Placater Mode dither full of ambiguous uses of "be with you" and no doubt heavy eye contact and a breathy voice, but she's a complete cliche. All she has in the way of a life before Bryce is having been teased (which she exaggerates into "bullied") by richer kids at school. We're told that she gets an acting job by reading the lines in a certain way, but did she decide to read them that way randomly or by studying the original book? She goes to a church where a Reverend Doctor Feelgood type gives sermons half a paperback page long (he could just leave them as messages on his answering machine, since it's 2018 and people still use phones). We're not shown what people learn or experience in this church except that they're going through the motions of entering a house of worship, hearing a vaguely religious soundbite with no room for challenging questions or deep study, and of course donating money. We do see that this church still demands that nice, polite people tolerate rude, pushy extrovert behavior with never a helpful word of guidance like "Back off!' or "Bad question." It's Christian in the sense that it's not Buddhist, but whether or not it's spiritual is not clearly explained. People mention prayer groups and entertainment for children; what we see Bryce and Lana doing is spending Bryce's money on overrated, heavily marketed, overpriced amusements. They take limousines when they could walk; they eat lobster when mackerel would be more nutritious. And no thought went into Bryce's allegedly successful apps, which are described as marketing directories that had been designed long before 2018. Genre fiction is supposed to retell the same stories over and over, but I would have liked to see some original thought at least in the conversation, even in a romance.
But it's a clean romance, as advertised. Those who want to remember the thrill of the first few kisses will probably enjoy it.
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