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A review by paulabrandon
Under Currents by Nora Roberts
1.0
Zane and his sister Britt survive a grim childhood of abuse until their father and mother are sent to prison. The two grow up. Zane, now a lawyer, returns to his hometown. He meets Darby McCray, a landscaping artist who is doing up the bungalows on the property owned by his aunt, Emily, who always believed in him as a boy. Lots of landscaping banality ensues as various antagonists pop up to threaten Zane and Darby's happiness.
I picked up this Nora Roberts book because I needed a break from unreliable female narrators, and I thought this might offer some decent romantic suspense. Not on your nelly! After a decent first part - quite harrowing, at times, as it details Zane and Britt's abuse at the hands of their father - the plot and pacing completely dies in the ass as we get endless details about Darby's landscaping endeavours. Seriously, it's all anybody can fucking talk about!
This book was so boring. Nothing happens. If it's not the constant chit-chat about what a good job Darby has done on someone's property, it's a blow-by-blow account of a softball game or the preparation for a big family party. There's absolutely zero spark to the proceedings. The book relies on not one, but three, antagonists to try to jar this out of its monotony.
As a romantic suspense book, I was expecting a focus on the romance over the more sinister aspects of the story, but this can't even get the romance right. This makes the same mistake as a lot of the category romance that I read, in which there's no stakes to the h and H's relationship, and zero indication of what it is that attracts them to one another. Aside from sharing their abusive histories (Darcy is a domestic violence survivor), they don't talk about anything substantial whatsoever. They just talk about landscaping or other banal activities that Zane's extended family is up to. Zane and Darby start a relationship and fall in love. There's zero conflicts for them to overcome emotionally, just a parade of villains who want to kill them. Everything here was just flat, flat, flat. This was uninspired, uninteresting and undercooked.
I picked up this Nora Roberts book because I needed a break from unreliable female narrators, and I thought this might offer some decent romantic suspense. Not on your nelly! After a decent first part - quite harrowing, at times, as it details Zane and Britt's abuse at the hands of their father - the plot and pacing completely dies in the ass as we get endless details about Darby's landscaping endeavours. Seriously, it's all anybody can fucking talk about!
This book was so boring. Nothing happens. If it's not the constant chit-chat about what a good job Darby has done on someone's property, it's a blow-by-blow account of a softball game or the preparation for a big family party. There's absolutely zero spark to the proceedings. The book relies on not one, but three, antagonists to try to jar this out of its monotony.
As a romantic suspense book, I was expecting a focus on the romance over the more sinister aspects of the story, but this can't even get the romance right. This makes the same mistake as a lot of the category romance that I read, in which there's no stakes to the h and H's relationship, and zero indication of what it is that attracts them to one another. Aside from sharing their abusive histories (Darcy is a domestic violence survivor), they don't talk about anything substantial whatsoever. They just talk about landscaping or other banal activities that Zane's extended family is up to. Zane and Darby start a relationship and fall in love. There's zero conflicts for them to overcome emotionally, just a parade of villains who want to kill them. Everything here was just flat, flat, flat. This was uninspired, uninteresting and undercooked.