Wednesday, August 04, 2010

Scarred for Life by Shea K

Let’s see - you are uncomfortable in your own skin, you are restless and unable to stay in one place too long, you don’t want to hang out with your friends, don’t really trust anyone, and you tend to scrounge on your relatives by showing up uninvited at their doorstep asking for a bed for a few days. In fact you are homeless by choice, moving around purely for the sake of not getting attached to anyone or anything.

One day you show up at – what you think is – the doorstep of your cousin’s house asking for a bed, and by pure chance you get into the home of someone with a kind soul willing to help you changes your lifestyle and needing you in return to put a new meaning into their life. Does it sound like real life? Not by far, but does that really matter? We are after all dealing with romantic fiction.

The Great Dane (no we’ ant talking dogs here!) or Danny - to her friends - is an ex-musician and the homeless protagonist of this story, and Nicole is the owner of the house on whose doorstep Dane comes looking for a bed for a couple of nights. Dane is shown to the den by Nicole’s boyfriend – Dane’s cousin - and crashes on the couch oblivious to the fact that Nicole – whom she haven’t met – decides to end the relationship with her obnoxious cousin in the early hours of the morning. This leaves the rather surprised Nicole with a house guest and Dane with a choice of leaving with a rumbling stomach or staying for breakfast, a shower and – well - something more.

This is a simple story with a storyline that I really can’t see how anyone could stretch to a 252 pages long novel, but Shea K did exactly that mostly by relaying the interactions between Danny and Nicole while they share the sort of everyday life that I guess we all live most of the time – making a meal, lounging on the couch, watching TV, going to work, cleaning the house etc.

I’m serious, nothing much is going on and what you get for two-thirds of the story is mostly just one day after another of two women rooming together, building the foundation of a friendship and a dependency on each other for something that they didn’t know they needed, or was able to give.

One of the best things you can say about this romance is that it’s slow moving. Nothing of the too fast falling in love and heat for the ladies in “Scarred for Life”, they take their time. On the other hand you won’t get the earth-shattering romance either, somehow the deeper feelings and the angst part of falling in love and acting on it doesn’t really come across in the story.

Overall I’ll say that this is a nice romance and it did hold my attention all the way to the end – no fast scrolling needed to get through the story, but if you are looking for drama and steamy sex, you’ll find better entertainment elsewhere. There is a sort of extra chapter to the story in “Birthday Treat”.

I don’t know if anyone is looking for stories involving women of colour, but I thought that I should mention that Nicole is half Puerto Rican, not that it has any influence on the storyline, and that there is a rather surprising story behind the “caramel-colour” of Dane’s skin.

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