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kair_ree 's review for:
Codename Charming
by Lucy Parker
Lucy Parker is a wonderful writer and I have loved so many of her stories, but this series is not working for me. I wasn't thrilled by the first Palace Insiders book and, while I started out liking this one more, it eventually fell flat.
Pet, our heroine, is a personal assistant for Johnny, one half of the royal couple I couldn't have cared less about from the first book, and Matthias, our hero, is one of his body men. They are constantly in the press because Johnny is a walking disaster. Unfortunately, rumors have begun to spread that Pet and Johnny are having an affair. The Palace gets involved and decides that the way to squash the rumor is to put Pet even more firmly in the public eye by having her and Matthias fake date (apparently the members of the public that don't believe Pet is sleeping with Johnny are shipping her on twitter with Matthais and the Palace believes this will become the new hot story).
None of that makes sense from a PR perspective, really, but it's a romance novel and I was willing to go with it. This set up doesn't work as a catalyst for a great story though as Pet and Matthias have very little stress about the fake dating and they almost immediately start making out (so there isn't much tension about them being attracted to each other either). Thinking about it now, a better approach might have been Pet worrying about her losing her job (because she would totally be fired or reassigned in order to stop the rumors) and Matthias offering to fake date her in order to save it. Would have been far more compelling for me and far less passive for the characters.
This book relies heavily on inner monologues and on other people telling Pet and Matthias how into each other they are. This happens nonstop and was tedious and annoying. I don't want other people telling Pet that Matthias has a thing for her, I want to read examples of Matthias having a thing for her. I don't want Matthias hearing that Pet has been into him since day 1, I want to read her awkward attempts at flirting and gaining his attention and her sadness that he's not returning her interest.
Matthias is saddled with a heavy backstory that never really seems to get fully fleshed out or resolved and I also didn't like that the lesson he learns is that a woman will sort of fix/save him. He should be in therapy. Oh! And the cutesy ending on this had me seething. Actually, I'm taking away the rounding up to 3 stars I was originally giving this because that was god awful.
Finally, the size difference thing here was weirdly written. Pet is 5' I think? I can't remember if her height was ever given, but Matthias might as well be an orc with the way people talk about him. It actually started to make me uncomfortable. I think there were two scenes with two sets of different people giving advice to Pet about how to have sex with him without being hurt because he's just so huge. I don't want to worry about the heroine's vagina every time the hero approaches her. It read like she was about to be assaulted by a baseball bat, but then it turned out that he wasn't that big and there was no need for us to have read about how she'd have to cope with it.
All in all, this book suffers from the same issues the first book had- a lackluster pairing that is surrounded by too many characters and too many plot lines. On top of that there are just some plain weird things that are cartoonish and dare I say self indulgent of the author. This needed serious streamlining and a narrower focus. I don't think I'd read another book in this world.