Review: Nothing Personal

Nothing Personal, Jaci Burton, book review

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Multi-millionaire casino owner Ryan McKay needs a bride in a hurry, and the one he chose has just backed out, which means he could lose his company within hours. He doesn’t know the meaning of the word failure, so he’s scrambling for Plan B and not happy that the ridiculous terms of his grandfather’s will have backed him into a corner.

So when his shy but dedicated executive assistant Faith Lewis tells him she’ll do everything in her power to make sure he succeeds, she’s shocked to realize Plan B = involves her—in other words, he wants to marry her. Like right now.

Faith reluctantly agrees, burying the heavy crush she’s had on Ryan for years. But the shy virgin is going to have to live with, sleep with, and reveal so many secrets to the enigmatic man who sees this as a logical business deal. Faith’s been holding out for love, and that four letter word isn’t in Ryan’s vocabulary after being raised by a cold, loveless family.

But love very rarely follows the rules of business or logic, and this business deal is about to get very personal.
Genre: contemporary romance

Publishing date: August 2014

Offensive content: a few sex scenes

Review: 
Nothing Personal had potential, but there are too many things wrong with it for me to give it a rating higher than 2 stars.

First, the storyline is a total cliché: millionaire needs to marry in order to secure ownership of the family company (due to a weird provision in his grandfather's will). As a desperate measure he turns to his personal assistant, who agrees to go ahead with the wedding and get pregnant withing a year (and who has been secretly in love with boss for the past 5 years). Can it get any cheesier? Add in a machinating cousin (intent on stealing the company), a lawyer who has to live with the couple for one year to make sure they sleep in the same room (no comments), and an English butler, and you have a recipe for...well, an idiot story.

Ryan comes across as a cold hearted business man from page one. He even says that he intends to get Faith pregnant but couldn't care less about the child. So, he's basically conceiving a child to ensure ownership of a company but admits he will not raise said child. Worse, he will not love his child. As a mother, I couldn't help but to be deeply shocked by this. When he then goes days without eating, bathing or showing up at the company because Faith left him, I really could not believe his change in attitude.

Faith, on the other hand, acts like a real doormat right until the last scene in the book, when she finally shows a bit of backbone. But even then, it sounds false and unrealistic. She accepts to marry a man she knows doesn't love her to help him save the company. She'll get money out of it, of course, but money never really seems to be her real motivation. There's absolutely no mention of family on her side, too, which is strange, other than a few references to her mother (which we don't really know if is living or not). Then, she agrees to the crazy notion of giving birth to a child who will, for all purposes, be abandoned by his or her father and never imposes any condition to all of this other than she wants to wait two months to have sex. Really?

And then, I didn't really get the purpose of the will. At first, I thought the purpose of Ryan's marriage and the subsequent pregnancy condition would be to produce an heir. But if Ryan plans to have nothing to do with the child, it doesn't really make sense. The more  read it, the more it looked like the author inserted the pregnancy clause to "force" the characters to have sex.



There's really very little true romance in all of this, and what little there is, rings false. This is obviously my personal opinion, there are lots of wonderful reviews over at Amazon, so check it out if  you want, but from my side, I'm sorry, but I can't really recommend this book.

Well, better luck next time.

Happy readings,

the book worm, book blog


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