Review: Maid to Fit by Rebecca Avery

✩✩✩

Genre: Contemporary romance

Offensive content: nothing much other than sex scenes, and rather soft at that.

I really wanted to like this story. When I read the description over at Amazon, I was hooked. And it had only 5-star reviews. But to be honest, the rest of the book did not live up to its description. 

Maid to Fit is the first book in a series of four (the others are Maid to Crave, Maid to Love and Maid to Order) and Rebecca Avery presents us with a group of soldiers that finished their tour of service and are trying to adjust back to civilian life. Master Sergeant Russell “Rusty” Hawkins was their unit leader in the army and has taken over the role of their adviser now. Then there is the quiet and serious Sergeant First Class Ronald "Ronnie" Brown, who wants to go back to school and get a college degree, Staff Sergeant Ian Hamilton, the clown of the group, and Sergeant First Class Seth "Pole" Lewis, a former exotic dancer (no comments there). And then there is Buck, their service dog in the army, that was adopted by Ronnie.

I haven't read any of the other books, but I'm assuming each of the men gets its own story. The first book is about Ronnie, who accepts to work for the cleaning service company Rusty has inherited from his grandfather. 

So far so good. A handsome, muscled man cleaning my house? Where do I sign in? 

Enter Kayla Clark, a single mother with a teenage daughter, Addie. Their life is a mess, their house is a mess and, as a mother of two working full time, I can relate. Kayla is working overtime to make ends meet, has a crappy boss, her mother has been diagnosed with Alzheimer's and she feels guilty enough that she's missing important moments of her daughter's life in those precious last years before she leaves home for college. She decides to hire a cleaning service to see if at least her house is put back in order.

This first part of the book is OK, and the first conversations between Kayla and Ronnie are rather funny. Initially they only talk on the phone and she thinks he must be an old grandfatherly type army veteran, while he thinks she's married to some hot-shot guy. Their first encounter is downright hilarious and even kind of sexy. 

From then on, the story lost interest. Ronnie is just too handsome, too perfect and Kayla, while she has obvious shortcomings when it comes to manage her daily life, seems to have the perfect body. Or so Ronnie thinks. She doesn't seen to think the same, but mother/housewife in me expected something a bit more realistic. Their flirtation starts right away and while it predictably builds up to sex, it all felt unnatural and a bit forced. Even the sex scenes fell a little flat for me. I never felt there was a true connection between them despite the author's efforts to tell me otherwise.

And then there is the whole issue of Ronnie coaching Addie's cheerleading squad. That part of the book seemed taken from a teenage novel instead of a contemporary adult romance.

I finished reading it because I rarely leave any book unfinished but honestly, I won't be reading the others in the series unless I'm suddenly granted a lot of free time. And even then...maybe not. I'm giving it three stars just because the premise was good, an interesting twist from the almost predictable scrips of most contemporary romance novels, but I felt the author could have done so much more with the storyline.  If it wasn't for the original idea, it would not have gone over two stars for sure.

So, read it if you have time on your hands and are looking for a super light way to pass it, but don't expect much more than that.