The Dirty Truth by Winter Renshaw is a romance novel set to release on the 14th of June 2022! Thanks to NetGalley, I was able to read it a bit earlier than that!
After being dead for nearly three minutes, Elle decides that she wants to try living again! After a run-in with her asshole boss, she decides to quit. After a meeting with his niece, Elle agrees to mentor her, and things go from there!
I do want to give Winter Renshaw some credit to start with; even though the version provided to us is unedited, I didn’t catch any of the usual mistakes. The story also started fairly strong. While I normally don’t give romance novels higher than three (out of five) stars, I was beginning to think I’d have to make an exception for this one!
Long story short; I didn’t.
Don’t get me wrong, The Dirty Truth is a decent romance novel, but that's all it is; just decent. It isn't exceptional in any way.
I loved Elle at the start, but her behavior became more and more cliched as the book went on; why is she standing there and rumpling his hair to make it less perfect? The cheesiness of that killed me (in a not good way). She also really bulldozed over all of his boundaries in a way that I didn’t appreciate —yes he needed to open up, but if he did this to her, I’d like to tell her to run away!
Scarlett, West's niece, was a sweetheart though. However, I felt like both of them were really hard on her. They expected every meeting to be the one that turned her around and make her a good kid. That feels like an odd burden to place on a child.
So as a whole, while The Dirty Truth is a nice read, I think Winter Renshaw could have done better, given the number of books she’s already written.