aka, How Not To Write A Slow Burn

I don’t know, guys. No exaggeration—this book was awful.

The core of slow burn, for me, is maximum interaction between the MCs with lots of on-page sexual/emotional tension.

And that’s exactly what this was missing. You’d think that having our heroine rent a garage apartment from Rhodes would involve some forced proximity… and you’d be wrong 😑 By the 50+% mark we were still in the ‘one head nod from across the driveway every few weeks’ part. And I was dying inside.

And when the romance began, it was all off-page! This book really had the gall to to have LITERALLY NOTHING happen for hundreds of pages and then be all like ‘oh yeah, these past weeks we’ve hung out a few times and now I know so much about him.’ I don’t think so! On-page, or it didn’t happen.

And then we had this classic slow burn cop-out: ‘I’ll be gone for weeks for work.’ Followed immediately by abrupt ILY declarations and then more “the next couple of weeks went by in an absolute blur” off-page nonsense 🤯

But it had to be off-page, because nothing made any sense. They were fully together, sleeping in the same bed every night, but it was still a “slow burn” because they weren’t holding hands or kissing yet? WHAT WAS THE REASON?? Other than ‘we still have 100+ pages to go and time to waste.’ But don’t worry, there was a miscommunication-y third act break up too because, why not? 🙃

Plus all this:
👎 The cringiest nicknames I’ve ever read.
👎 Seriously, what is going on with the pee?? This woman could not go one hour without peeing. And when she talked about going “poopy” (with zero children in the room)…💀
👎 Terrible writing—it was repetitive, circular, and even had mistakes?
👎 And character writing that sacrificed depth for hotness too many times to result in meaningful personalities for these MCs.

I’ve loved every other Mariana Zapata I’ve read but this book is making me question everything 🤷🏻‍♀️