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morwen1031 's review for:
Burn for You
by J.T. Geissinger
I should preface this by saying I am not from the South, I've barely driven through states that would be considered distinctly "Southern", and I've never been to New Orleans. Despite all of that, this book still came off to me as a romance starring Foghorn Leghorn, i.e., a total fucking caricature of southern culture, and New Orleans in particular.
The southern "isms" were so frequent and cartoonish that it was distracting, and it seriously made me question whether JT Geissinger has ever actually been to New Orleans. I know I haven't, but I've read enough bad literature about people that are writing tough city characters without ever having been to or lived in NYC (or one of its ethnic enclaves, Italian-American, specifically) to know when I'm being pandered to.
Couple that with both a heroine and a hero that are so emotionally stunted and immature, and I just got a big old ball of what-the-fuck. This is all without even mentioning the problematic ways in which the author portrays overweight black female characters (Eeny, for reference), that so often left me uncomfortable that I contemplated DNFing. And this is really a shame, because the next two Slow Burn books are so fucking good. Frankly, I'm really glad you can read them out of order, because if I had actually read this one first, I probably would have thrown in the towel and missed out on the other two.
To be honest, the only reason this even got two stars is because I think it was at least a step in the right direction to have a bipoc female protagonist, and to at least touch on the subject of mental health awareness (i.e. Jackson's semicolon tattoo). However, the latter was so fucking offhand that it feels like it was almost inserted to throw us crazies a bone because it's literally never expanded upon or mentioned again.
I guess I'm rounding up to two from 1.5 stars then.
The southern "isms" were so frequent and cartoonish that it was distracting, and it seriously made me question whether JT Geissinger has ever actually been to New Orleans. I know I haven't, but I've read enough bad literature about people that are writing tough city characters without ever having been to or lived in NYC (or one of its ethnic enclaves, Italian-American, specifically) to know when I'm being pandered to.
Couple that with both a heroine and a hero that are so emotionally stunted and immature, and I just got a big old ball of what-the-fuck. This is all without even mentioning the problematic ways in which the author portrays overweight black female characters (Eeny, for reference), that so often left me uncomfortable that I contemplated DNFing. And this is really a shame, because the next two Slow Burn books are so fucking good. Frankly, I'm really glad you can read them out of order, because if I had actually read this one first, I probably would have thrown in the towel and missed out on the other two.
To be honest, the only reason this even got two stars is because I think it was at least a step in the right direction to have a bipoc female protagonist, and to at least touch on the subject of mental health awareness (i.e. Jackson's semicolon tattoo). However, the latter was so fucking offhand that it feels like it was almost inserted to throw us crazies a bone because it's literally never expanded upon or mentioned again.
I guess I'm rounding up to two from 1.5 stars then.