Title: Property of Mr. Simon

Author: speedocks

Genre: "Romance"

Quick Summary: *quietly sucks air in through my teeth*

Thoughts:

I have so many problems with this book and I'm not entirely sure where to start, to be honest.

The writing needs work. There's odd twists to phrases, grammatical slip-ups, and a whole slough of tense-switching. I'm not sure which tense we're supposed to be in with this book, but ideally it should be one tense and it should be stuck to like glue. Ideally.

I can't feel for any of these characters, except for Megan. I hate Wade. He's a total privileged rich asshole that can't see past his own nose and his goals are inconsistent and I hate he's one of the POV characters because the more I read from his perspective, the more I want to run him over with one of his many cars. I hate Bryan. He's two steps away from becoming a rapist, and the way literally everyone but Megan talks about him makes me incredibly uncomfortable. Everyone keeps telling Megan he likes her and to go easy on him, except she doesn't like him. That should be enough. No means no, and she's said it directly and indirectly several several times and everyone fucking ignores her. I hate her friends, and I can't tell Isabella and Autumn apart to be honest because they're written in such a shallow manner. In fact, honestly, everyone's kinda written in a shallow, stock character manner, and it irks me something fierce.

So let's talk about Wade, because he's one of the POV characters. I already mentioned he's a total dick tool. He reeks of misogyny, has charming quotes like "So long as she has a pussy, I can adjust to it", and his entire conflict in the start of this book is that he needs to have an heir and/or wife or his dying dad is going to cut his own business away from Wade's and Wade will lose money and his father's approval or something to that effect. Now look. I'm no business tycoon, but I don't know why he needs Simon Inc. considering he's made his own business for himself for the ground up and is doing well. But whatever. 

At first he's adamant about not finding an heir or a wife at all. But then, by the end of chapter one, he changes his mind and I'm not entirely sure why. We never really are shown why. So then he decides he's going to roll over like a dog and bend to his father's wishes anyway... but for some reason he equates that to needing to fall in love with someone? For a business man, he isn't all that bright. Surrogacy exists. Adoption exists. Hell, he seems morally depraved enough to knock some woman up and swoop in asking for full custody nine months later. Honestly, his side of this story just sounds like a half-planned excuse to make the romance arc happen.

Oh, and speaking of romance. I can't ship this. Which is bad because the entire point of this being a romance book is that I'm supposed to be able to ship this. That's how romance works. Except Wade is a discarded piece of circumcized foreskin in a business suit and possessive to boot. They aren't even dating. Yet. But they're going to be. And I can't ship it. 

And look, a certain level of possessiveness [mostly on a kink level, which this book is supposed to have] is okay, but only after they start dating, and within the confines of BDSM. And not in a way that makes Wade out to sound like a serial abuser. For god's sake, he saw her for the first real time at a party and was already acting like he owned her. My red flags would all be raised by this behavior if I was Megan. And I know that as resistant as she is now, that's going to be gone soon, and honestly it just makes me kind of sad. Also he takes her phone in chapter 7 and uses it without her permission? And ignores her when she says no to his contract? No means no, not "give it a bit of time and think it over more". She said no. When he persisted, he became no better than Bryan. In fact, if anything, he became worse than Bryan. That's not good foundation for the rest of their "relationship".

In general, the plot is a bunch of circumstantial events forced together that shouldn't have been forced together because they don't mesh, and there's so many tropes used that I would've liked to not have seen. FMC gets dragged to a party and ditched by friends. Rich possessive assclown. Going to a restaurant and the waitress flirting with the MMC [for the record, IRL, most waitresses don't flirt because they don't care. They have to be nice to you or they don't get paid. That's not flirting. That's them forcing niceties so they don't have to listen to you bitch later because they smiled wrong]. FMC gets drunk and MMC has to take her to his place so she can sober up. I wish... I could've seen scenes that were a touch more original.

I could stand the POV switches, but I disliked the points where there were both POVs in one chapter. It's generally better to avoid having more than one POV/chapter.

To summarize: Aside from Megan, every character is either an abusive asshole/potential rapist or just a plain asshole. I can't ship the romance. Wade as a person is fucking disgusting. No one in this book has even an iota of understanding of what boundaries are. The plot isn't all that cohesive. Megan needs to move far far away from all these rotten shoe pieces - change her name if she has to.

But hey. The cover looked cool.