Five Minutes Late by Rich Amooi
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Boy, if you eliminated all the reviews that weren’t in exchange for a free copy, the star rating would drop by about three full stars. I was very disappointed in this book. The author happens to be local to me, and I always like giving good reviews to other writers in my area, but I can’t with this one. The romance is at junior high level, as is the maturity of the characters. The author keeps putting up artificial barriers between the two characters.
Much of the dialog was witty and fun, but then it would be spoiled by excessively crude language. When it wasn’t gross crude it was gross mushy. None of the characters remotely resembles a real person. The lead characters were impossibly perfect – beautiful, handsome, rich, brilliant, yet the woman, a 10, dates nothing but zeroes. The guy doesn’t date anyone until he meets her. The gay buddy in the library is an offensive stereotype. The vindictive cop ex-boyfriend of the woman is an offensive stereotype. About all you can say for the author is that at least he didn’t have any black characters or he’d probably show them shuckin’ and jivin’ or worse.