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A review by iam
Deal Maker by Lily Morton
4.0
Happy to say I enjoyed this more thoroughly than Rule Breaker which is loosely tied to Deal Maker.
Reading the two books back to back it's obvious how similar they are in many ways. The main characters share a lot of similarities, and the love interests have some of the same attributes, but it's the overall formula of the romances that makes the two books alike. The center piece here is that one half of the couple is convinced he can't do a relationship, but is unable to resist the other, leading to "just sex" that obviously isn't just sex followed by a crash followed by a happy ending.
Deal Maker's crash is rather short, which I appreciated, but it still made me roll my eyes a bit, though overall it was alright.
One thing I didn't like about Rule Breaker was how the last third of the book seemed to drag, and luckily Deal Maker doesn't have the same problem. Overall, I just liked the two main characters a little bit better, but what I really adored about his book was Billy. Billy is the love interest's five year old son, and he's a delight. I love how present he was throughout the book, never getting shoved back for the main relationship to take center stage. A lot of romance novels with present child characters have the child be surprisingly and maybe unrealistically wise for their age, even giving relationship advice - I don't necessarily mind that, but this is not the case here anyways. Billy reads very much like a small child, wholly engaged in typical small-child things and being responsible for a lot of the book's humor.
The book is written in first person from Jude's POV, but there are a few scenes written from love interests Asa's perspective as well. It didn't necessarily throw me off, but I wondered a bit about the purpose of the POV switch, since it overall seemed kind of pointless. I didn't feel like I got any new insights or knowledge from his parts, as he was rather easy to read through Jude's POV.
One thing that made me bristle was a conversation (or rather argument) between Jude and one of Asa's exes. They threw a lot of words around the likes of "whore" or "slut", but the way they talked to each other as two men who both slept with a lot of people, painting each other's behaviour in a bad light made, was frankly appalling and me extremely uncomfortable.
Another minor thing I kept wondering about:
Reading the two books back to back it's obvious how similar they are in many ways. The main characters share a lot of similarities, and the love interests have some of the same attributes, but it's the overall formula of the romances that makes the two books alike. The center piece here is that one half of the couple is convinced he can't do a relationship, but is unable to resist the other, leading to "just sex" that obviously isn't just sex followed by a crash followed by a happy ending.
Deal Maker's crash is rather short, which I appreciated, but it still made me roll my eyes a bit, though overall it was alright.
One thing I didn't like about Rule Breaker was how the last third of the book seemed to drag, and luckily Deal Maker doesn't have the same problem. Overall, I just liked the two main characters a little bit better, but what I really adored about his book was Billy. Billy is the love interest's five year old son, and he's a delight. I love how present he was throughout the book, never getting shoved back for the main relationship to take center stage. A lot of romance novels with present child characters have the child be surprisingly and maybe unrealistically wise for their age, even giving relationship advice - I don't necessarily mind that, but this is not the case here anyways. Billy reads very much like a small child, wholly engaged in typical small-child things and being responsible for a lot of the book's humor.
The book is written in first person from Jude's POV, but there are a few scenes written from love interests Asa's perspective as well. It didn't necessarily throw me off, but I wondered a bit about the purpose of the POV switch, since it overall seemed kind of pointless. I didn't feel like I got any new insights or knowledge from his parts, as he was rather easy to read through Jude's POV.
One thing that made me bristle was a conversation (or rather argument) between Jude and one of Asa's exes. They threw a lot of words around the likes of "whore" or "slut", but the way they talked to each other as two men who both slept with a lot of people, painting each other's behaviour in a bad light made, was frankly appalling and me extremely uncomfortable.
Another minor thing I kept wondering about: