WARNING: This is a review, there are spoilers in it! So please, if you don't want the book to be spoiled... go read it first!
And then tell me what you thought about it in the comments section.
Trust in Advertising by Victoria Michaels
In this book we invade the mindset of Alexandra White, best known as Lexi White. Lexi is a recently orphaned college dropout that lives in the city of San Francisco. She dropped out of school to take care of her alzheimers' afflicted, widowed father. A noble cause for sure. In this pursuit she pushes her dreams of becoming a marketing/advertising mogul aside.
After getting through the death of her father, the last living family member she had; she's in San Fran attempting to live it up in the big city. Problem is she's stuck. Stuck in an ordinary job at a record store. Stuck in a field where she can't grow. And thus she decides (with the help of her dashing side kick, her bff) to start applying for entry level jobs in her dream field.
Eventually, she gets a job with Hunter Advertising and within the week is being promoted from pretty much lunch girl to executive assistant (ha ha). Low and behold but who should her new boss be? Oh just her high school -and pretty much lifelong- crush, Vincent Drake. Except now, the boy that she barely knew in high school but apparently had a well formed opinion of, is nothing like the man she encounters. He's silent, broody, mistrustful and rude but damn hot. Shocker -I know-. Vincent has been hurt many times before by the women he decided to hare his life with bla bla bla bla. She is insecure about her worth in his eyes as she was a nobody in high school and all that jazz.
His family is the owner of the Advertising agency where they work with just sparks more distrust for Vincent as everybody around him thinks him to be privileged. She turns out to be an advertising super star nailing pitches, creating innovative campaign ideas and so forth. They try to keep it professional but can't, he fucks it up repeatedly and apologizes repeatedly. After the huge fuck up at the end he grovels and eventually they have their happily ever after.
So, what do I really think about this book?
It was a bit bla, at times the MC was too insecure for my taste. I like my leading ladies assertive, confident and intelligent. Also there were times when the book was trying to be sneaky dropping hints about future plot twists but in reality it wasn't sneaky, it definitely wasn't surprising and since it read in an obvious manner I just ended up exasperated that the MC couldn't see what was being spelled out -literally- right in front of her. I think the book tried too hard to be exciting at the end and crammed as much coupling action in there as it could. It should have picked a main plot focus; either the scandal or the love story. For me both lacked build up and foundation. The world development was poor at best; we get half-assed descriptions of the settings and almost no written views of the city. Otherwise it was an ok read, though not as fun as other Victoria Michaels books I've read. All in all a cliche riden, proved to be liked stereotypes sort of book. I would recommend this for a boring afternoon.
RATING: Bleeh. 50/50
