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clarafoster 's review for:
Moonlighter
by Sarina Bowen
Look. This book is, in many ways, a paradigm of Bowen's work. And that's both a good and a bad thing. The hero is a loveable grump, the heroine is shiny and successful, the mystery plot is intriguing, and the fun thing about Bowen is that the tropes are never quite what you expect; I never thought I'd be able to read a book with a pregnant heroine where the baby is not the hero's and the pregnancy isn't so much a plot-point as it is a simple fact that doesn't remotely get in the way of the romance. So props for that.
But over the years I've started to find that her characters are a little bit samey. Worse than that, it all feels a little bit shallow--all the characters have huge amounts of money and we're supposed to just accept that they're great people who have never benefitted from anything untoward? And that they're all extraordinarily talented and there was absolutely no nepotism involved in anything at all? I know this is high-fantasy romance here, but it's jarring. Especially when the heroine gets up to give a speech about problems in technology which neither inspires nor addresses the main ethical ramifications of a digital world. Am I expecting too much from a romance? Maybe, but this is a women who's supposed to be a brilliant CEO ready to take the world by storm.
And where things get really sticky? There's only one person of colour in the whole book. One. He's 'East Asian, at least by heritage', he works in cyber, and guess what? He's the villain. Yikes.
But over the years I've started to find that her characters are a little bit samey. Worse than that, it all feels a little bit shallow--all the characters have huge amounts of money and we're supposed to just accept that they're great people who have never benefitted from anything untoward? And that they're all extraordinarily talented and there was absolutely no nepotism involved in anything at all? I know this is high-fantasy romance here, but it's jarring. Especially when the heroine gets up to give a speech about problems in technology which neither inspires nor addresses the main ethical ramifications of a digital world. Am I expecting too much from a romance? Maybe, but this is a women who's supposed to be a brilliant CEO ready to take the world by storm.
And where things get really sticky? There's only one person of colour in the whole book. One. He's 'East Asian, at least by heritage', he works in cyber, and guess what? He's the villain. Yikes.