Nevermore Bookstore (Townsend Harbor, #1) by Kerrigan Byrne & Cynthia St. Aubin
Actual Rating: 1.0
This book is unfortunately a perfect example of why you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover. Because if you were like me, you saw the cute little illustration on the cover, got ready for a cozy bookstore romance, and was smacked in the face instead with sexual innuendo after sexual innuendo.
Nevermore Bookstore follows Cody Bloomquist, who runs her little bookshop and spends her days stocking shelves. The highlight of her week, though, are the late night phone calls she gets from a customer who she only knows as “Fox.”
Fox’s real name is Roman Fawkes, and he hasn’t left his mountain hideaway in years. The highlight of his weeks are those same late night phone calls. One night, however, someone breaks into the bookstore and Fox realizes that there’s nothing he can do for Cady, miles away on the other end of the line. This is when he realizes…maybe it’s time to come down from the mountain.
When I ran into a sentence in the first few pages about Cady’s “vital organs [turning] to melted butter” after all Fox did was utter two syllables, I realized that this wasn’t my type of book. And I was right; every page is littered with lines about how Cady and Fox were each getting turned on by the other’s presence, but their relationship is not at all interesting beyond that. I found a lot of the phrasing (“the way her lady bits stole her heartbeat when he so much as breathed”) and dialogue (“Why don’t you ever, like — I don’t know — send me pictures of your dick?”) just extremely cringe and hard to take seriously.
I think I might’ve been more receptive to this kind of writing had the book eased into it and developed their relationship from strangers to call buddies, but the book jumped right into Cady and Fox already being extremely attracted to each other and I never felt like I understood why beyond the physical aspect.
Just generally, I was not a huge fan of the romance and I wasn’t able to connect to any of the characters or understand their motivations. It was very cliche with a male lead that was dark and broody (and a little creepy) who was very rude and toxic to the female lead, who still couldn’t stay away. If you’re into those types of romances you might enjoy this, but I personally just found the relationship between them very frustrating.
Plot-wise, it was just okay. I wasn’t really invested in any of it in large part due to the previous reasons, but also just because I did not find the story that interesting. There was very little reason it had to take place in a bookstore; the story seemed to revolve more around the romance and fighting over the bookstore as a general entity and it all just got very soapy at the end.
In conclusion…yeah this was not my thing. But if you like those romance novels with the photo of someone’s rock-hard abs on the cover, you might enjoy it…maybe?
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