The Bride by Julie Garwood: 9781101533116 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books

The Bride

By Julie Garwood
Review by Emmy Grant

"The Bride" starts strong by introducing the reader to some sound advice: pay your taxes or there will be consequences.
This wisdom, however, is rapidly forgotten, as we are then taken on a journey of an insufferable Mary Sue with daddy issues, who is more out of it than some of my clients on a cocktail of street drugs. Our heroine is forced into a marriage to what appears at first glance to be an overgrown mindless baboon, who expresses his opinion that women are property and should be treated as such at every opportunity he gets. 
It is, of course, quickly discovered that our baboon does have human emotions, and Ms. Mary Sue immediately wants him to love her, after knowing him for a whooping four days. 
The plot then becomes a grand mash of cliches, held together by unbearable cheesiness, with not an original thought in sight. The reading experience feels like the author wrote this as some sort of a joke, or a challenge to fit as many cliches in one book as one humanly can. It definitely does not read like anything written for an adult audience, which make the sex scenes all the more disturbing. 
As Ira Tate had put it, this book reminds one of a cupcake that is way too sweet, mawkish and fake, to the point it hurts your teeth and is inedible. The whole thing reads like Disney on steroids.
To be honest, the only reason I managed to finish this book is because Ira Tate could not get past 50%, and my competitive nature and self-hatred pushed me to shove the offensively tasting cupcake deep down my throat.
Throughout the book, we get glimpses of the thoughts of a mystery character who killed the male protagonist's first wife and is contemplating killing our brain-damaged heroine. Instead of really wondering who that is, the unfortunate reviewer of this novel was left with the impression that it was simply a narration of her own thoughts.

The Good
- The opening wisdom re: taxes?..

The Bad
- Everything else...
- This book is not even that well-written, which saves many books of this genre.
- The tiring unrealistic notion of a virgin (who, mind you, was supposed to be raised in an era where women's sexual pleasure and sexual education were basically not a thing; she is also described as religiously devout, which would make things in that domain even worse) who not only tremendously enjoys her first sexual experience with a total stranger she literally met earlier in the day, but also orgasms like crazy, from penetration, of course. Listen, as someone who lost her virginity to a virtual stranger (I have been on about 4 dates with the guy), I can promise you that this is *very* unlikely to happen, even if, like me, you received proper sex ed and were raised in a culture that did not frown upon women who enjoy sex.  
- The heroine is supposed to be quirky and likeable and #NotLikeOtherGirls, but she ends up reading like a modern female with rather poor knowledge of history, who is thrown back in time and whose social skills are so lacking that she cannot clue in to the fact that her behaviour is totally outside the norm and generally unacceptable. It is highly unlikely that someone who behaves like this would have been tolerated, much less liked, by the people around her. In comparison, even Whitney's (from "Whitney My Love") #NotLikeOtherGirls personality and society's reaction to it is more realistic. 
- Our Mary Sue also has extremely unrealistic reactions and feelings. For example, she seems completely infatuated with her husband's deceased first wife, with not a shred of jealousy, some degree of which might be expected of a normal human. She also has the weirdest mood swings, often getting completely infuriated by complete nonsense.
- The main male protagonist appears to be just big and violent at first, but then we discover his sensitive personality. The way it is written, though, does not make him any more likeable.
-  So what we really have here is two unrelateable, unlikable protagonists having a weird relationship packed with every cliche one can possibly come up with, with hot hot fornication between an inexperienced devout christian lady and a horny guy who seems to lack self-control and paws her at every opportunity he gets. 

Verdict: 1.5 stars out of 5

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