Title: Sweet Spot Series: Bakery Sisters #2
Author: Susan Mallery
Published: February 1, 2010
Genre(s): Romance: Contemporary
Page Count: 384
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:"Responsibility" should be Nicole Keyes's middle name. After all, not many people would sacrifice their lives to run the family bakery and raise a younger sibling. But with Nicole's twin sister now blissfully married and her younger sis turning out more femme fatale than girl-next-door, super reliable Nicole is getting sick of putting everyone else's needs first!
Enter Hawk. The deliciously sexy former NFL player offers Nicole a taste of the freedom she craves. Hawk may know the way, blindfolded, to her sweet spot, but Nicole's not about to let him get close enough to break her heart. Of course, she might not have a choice in the matter if Hawk's past keeps getting in the way of their present.
In short, Sweet Spot can henceforth be known as the book where everyone (including the dog) gets pregnant. I swear Susan Mallery’s characters just don’t do birth control. It’s insane, not to mention unrealistic, how much pregnancy is happening in one family. I can’t handle it. Sweet Talk was questionable. This is just plain bad.
What we have here is a failure to communicate. On every level. Mostly Hawk, our stupidly-named male lead, is our offender, but everyone else is guilty. Basically, everybody in Sweet Spot has the maturity level of a toddler (except maybe Raoul, the teenage side-character). I just could not with this characters. Especially Hawk. Somebody please go kill Hawk.
Okay, so. The book’s protagonist is Nicole, twin sister to Claire. Nicole raised her baby sister and took over the family bakery at a young age. She also is in the midst of divorcing her husband, who cheated on her with said baby sister. Enter Hawk, former NFL player who’s pushy, immature, and overconfident, but apparently sexy as all get out, so that excuses everything. His biggest problem is that he’s convinced he’s always right, and refuses to hear otherwise. He’s spoiled his daughter and set up a shrine for his dead wife; Nicole points this out, and he blows up on her. He apologizes, but then lashes out the very next time she tries to explain why his life is falling apart. Hawk sucked. He treated Nicole like crap and NEVER figured things out unless another character sat him down and explained. He was like a stupid kid.
Meanwhile, we have the unfortunate fact that Susan Mallery is a serial pregnancy-writer. It’s like if she’s run out of ideas, she throws in a surprise pregnancy. Out of the four female characters in this novel, all four are pregnant. None of these pregnancies are planned. All cause immediate tension and stupid fights. The freaking dog is pregnant, okay? There is no story-telling in Sweet Spot, because it’s just the characters running around acting immature, having unprotected sex, and then acting all surprised when they pee on the stick and it turns blue. What idiots.
This book is not well written. Sweet Spot infuriatingly bad, actually. I am officially parting ways with Susan Mallery. She is not the romance author for me. If you rely on unprotected sex to sell your “true love”, you are most certainly doing it wrong. Very wrong.
