Novel Review: Bad Girl by Maya Reynolds

Rating (Out of 5): ~1.5

Genre: Erotica

Publisher: Heat (Penguin)

Release Date: 2007

Spoilers?: No.

Buy it here: Amazon. Barnes and Noble.

Goodreads Synopsis:

A sizzling new voice in erotica offers a hot debut novel of sex and suspense.

Being bad can be so good. All it takes is the right man. By day, Sandy Davis is a dedicated social worker. By night, she's found an unlikely pastime: spying on her neighbors' erotic encounters. She tells herself that it's harmless, until one night she finds herself on the receiving end of such a fantasy-and an anonymous phone call from a peeping stranger who calls himself Justice, and whispers, "You've been a bad girl." The arousing predicament turns into a sensual dance between the adventurous pair. But when a third player enters their sexy game, the fun turns to something darker and more dangerous.

The Cover:

This cover isn't too bad for this book, it does give an idea of what it's about... but I'm also not a very big fan of it. It's not particularly pretty or nice to look at. The colors aren't very good, and it's kind of tacky.

Review:

I’ve had this book on my shelf for a long time at this point, and finally decided that I needed to just read it. At first it was slow, and I was just not getting very into it. I felt the attraction between the characters, and it was rather believable, but I was just not drawn in. Then I got a little over half-way through it, and I was starting to not enjoy it at all, but for a different reason.

The premise sounded good, kinky, fun. And at the beginning, it was. I liked Sandy, how intrigued she was by her neighbors, but then how wary she was when “Justice” called her. When they met, their attraction was apparent, they had chemistry, and they seemed to get along well. Not only with the sex, but also with their problems and personalities.

But then Sandy was confronted by Cabrini, a guy who lived across the street who she’d noticed possibly abusing girls, and a guy that Zeke was trailing while on the job. And, even after Cabrini’d told Sandy that he was going to get her, Sandy was a little frightened, but she didn’t tell Zeke. He almost kidnapped her, and she put off telling Zeke, because he was ‘busy’. But the tipping point for me was, after all this, she went outside alone, the next day. She brushed it off by saying that Cabrini was out of town, when anyone would have said that they should still be cautious. There was just no reason for her to be so stupid, especially when she’d been portrayed as being wary and ‘brave’.

There were also a few conflicting scenes with Cabrini’s submissive girl Lena, whom he’d obviously been abusing. In one scene, Sandy was disgusted with Lena, as if any of it were her fault (or as if being submissive were bad, in the first place), and in the next she felt bad for the girl. That just didn’t work for me, and kind of angered me at one point.

Then near the end, Zeke was going crazy with want to save Sandy (because the police were taking forever to do anything). This wouldn’t have bothered me so much, but it just became apparent to me that the two had been together all of, like, five days. And since he proposed to her at the end, that was a little too fast for me. I suppose it helps that they waited a while to actually get married, but still.

In the end, this book just got on my nerves too much. I wanted to like it, the sex was nice and the attraction worked at the beginning, but the characters didn’t.