Sexiest Man Alive

Sexiest Man Alive Diana Holquist Grade: D+ Sensuality: Warm When the editor at the magazine I review for listed the various books he had up for review, one featured a hero with purple eyes. How could I possibly not have chosen that one?

Obviously it takes more than a set of beautiful eyes for me to like a book. What's less obvious is why, precisely, I didn't like this one, because there's nothing horrendous about it. It's a sequel to Make Me a Match, which was reviewed on AAR by one of our reviewers who likes Chick Lit quite a bit more than I do. My guess is that even though Sexiest Man Alive is definitely a romance, one of the reasons I didn't really like it was that it had a sort of Chick Lit sensibility. Or maybe it was just an age thing. While I don't see myself as middle aged, I am in my 40s, and though I hesitate to say it, my guess is that it's "one for the younger crowd". Not for any particular reason that I can put my finger on - again, it's a sensibility thing.

I wrote this review in August but held it until the book was almost due to be released. AAR's review just went online yesterday...and guess what? The reviewer liked the book a tremendous amount more than I did. And I think my theory holds: Jane G. is substantially younger than I am.

Jasmine Burns is a talented clothing designer. But she's so fearful of men that she's almost a shut-in. Her fear of men goes back to a bad experience she had in India as a teenager with a young man. It seemed incredibly far-fetched to me that it would have created such a fear in her...at most the embarrassment might have made her shy, but not phobic. So the premise didn't work for me either.

Jasmine's psychic sister was always able to determine a person's One True Love. Although she no longer has this ability, before she lost it she realized that Jasmine's True Love is Josh Toby. She can't be more specific than that, and there are clearly more than one Josh Tobys around. So it seems like kismet when Jasmine is asked to design disguises for a gorgeous, violet-eyed actor named Josh Toby. The New York born and raised actor is quite the mensch, but he's very insecure about his craft, and how the media fails to take him seriously as a legitimate actor. So he's planning his debut on the stage as Romeo and wants to disguise himself from everybody during rehearsals. Again, far-fetched.

How Jasmine gets the gig is cleverly contrived, but guess what? It was far-fetched. More believable was the gut-wrenching pull Jasmine and Toby felt toward the other when they met, and I did like that Jasmine has a piece of fabric at home that exactly matches the color of Josh's eyes.

The world believes that Josh is engaged to a gorgeous actress, and when a conniving fellow designer leaks to the press that Jasmine and Josh are "dating", all those bad feelings Jasmine had in India come flooding back. So she begins to wonder whether or not the tall and gangly librarian Josh Toby might in fact be "the" Josh Toby for her, even though he seems to think she's as crazy as the homeless who regularly camp out at the library. It's all very clever, but it read to me like a play or a movie and seemed entirely artificial.

I liked actor Josh and Jasmine even though I didn't buy her phobia for a minute. What I didn't like was the frenetic style of story-telling employed by the author. It's almost as though the author tried to stick a serious theme into a 30s style romantic comedy. And an even bigger problem for me is the lack of time Jasmine and Josh spend together during the story. The reader doesn't see their attraction progress into a life-long love - it's as though they are hit with the thunderbolt, and that's enough.

The book's cover is very sexy, and that's misleading too. Beyond the whole heroine-is-still-a-virgin thing, the love scenes are very mild, much more Chick Lit like than romance novelesque. I'm sure that'll cause a lot of readers to pick it up off the shelves, but if they read it expecting a sexy read, they'll be disappointed.

Sexiest Man Alive is bad but not odious. If not for how badly it bored me, it might just be below average, but any book that is as much a chore to finish as this one was for me doesn't deserve a C level grade, as far as I'm concerned.

Essentially there are lots of reasons why I didn't care for this book, but each of them were small; it's only in the aggregate that they added up to a Big Problem.

TTFN, Laurie Likes Books

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