Total Creative Control

by Sally Malcolm and Joanna Chambers

[lessthelonely]

3/5 stars.

It's still really weird to me how much it's been taking me to finish books, lately. If the last one took me a full week, this one took me a bit longer than that, and not because I wasn't enjoying it.

Like, at this point you might as well know what I'm going to say: this is a contemporary romance centered around two male leads. We've been knew that's all I've been reading, don't we? It's called a coping mechanism, luv. Either way, this book doesn't have any sort of big-name tropes to shove at your face in its marketing. I found it through a mutual on Goodreads whose books reviewed with equal or higher ratings than 4 stars have been pleasing me.

However, at this point I don't know if any of the complaints I throw at this genre are warranted or if I'm just not still used to some of the little tropes that sometimes happen in these books: I'm not talking about Enemies to Lovers, but stuff like instant attraction. I mean, I guess that's not unrealistic, but it happens in this book and it turned me off. Probably because I can't relate. Most of the time, if I am that attracted to someone, it borders into that realm of me wanting to be that person. Only physically though.

But there's no freakish behavior like that in this book. It's just a little lust at first sight, which is fine, but then there are a lot of decisions that were made in this book that came out of absolutely nowhere. One example is a 4-week time-jump that happens a little after the middle if I recall correctly? Why? And, of course, it happens after what seems like a big break-off moment between the two lovebirds.

Allow me to rant for a bit and tell you why I complain so much about books that make what I call a fake breakup a plot point: in real life, this doesn't happen. I mean, I may not be the most romantically experienced guy out there, but second chance romances in real life aren't love stories... they're usually just regretted attempts, many times, on both parties involved. So I don't understand why we can't just have a romance without the characters having their first moment and let it escalate from there. I can enjoy having some distance forced between them if you're just teasing a big moment, like an explosive first kiss, first date, first [REDACTED], but if the characters have already kissed, dated, or [REDACTED], adding immediate distance between them doesn't make me want them to be together again... because, especially in Contemporary Romance, this distance is enforced by the characters themselves, it just makes me see the characters as emotionally lacking. Like, they can't deal with their feels, so it's easier to say "Oh, this was a one-time thing. I felt nothing" than, you know, actually try to make sense of those fluttery feelings?

Anyways... This book isn't bad because of any of what I said. I did enjoy it in the end, and this was way more slow-burn than the last one, which was marketed as a slow-burn and I begged to differ. The one problem with this one is that it has a lot of decisions that I don't understand? As another example, the beginning of the book shows us how the romantic pair meet... only to skip to years later and go for a pre-established crush route with the romance. It's giving We thought of one thing and realized we didn't want to do it but we had already written it, so... Obviously, this is just me trying to serve a read. This book isn't bad at all, delivering on most fronts - from the tropes to the actual themes.

I wasn't expecting this book to go as in-depth on fandom and writing as it did? I mean, I enjoyed it, because I could relate to a lot of what was being said in regards to writing and shipping. I, however, am still very much one to complain when there's a certain character who exists for the sole purpose of being annoying and they don't get their ass handed to them. And here's the thing: said annoying character in this book does get out of the way in the climax, but it's always so... bland? Aw, right, we already knew he was a phony for representation all along, but since now it's public he can't get away with it. It makes total sense, don't get me wrong! But I would've preferred it if he was honest-to-God fired. 

Outside of that, this is one of those books where the main two are the bread and butter, and that's OK. There is a character who's more present, whose name I don't remember and she's the only one that seems to have a bigger personality than a cookie-cutter personality to serve certain elements of the plot: the putrid annoying one, the cuckold, the girl in between the last two. Their functions range from justifying the climax to comic relief.

You can probably tell I'm not mentioning much about the main ones themselves, though. They were OK? Expected, at most. Not memorable, in my opinion. Also, since I'm not fully desensitized to smut I can honestly say the smut in this one wasn't as good as a lot of other ones I've read.

Either way, this is the definition of a coin flip - and yes, I find that positive.