Mating Game (2009)

Nola Grainger needs a man…and fast. Her grandmother has left her everything in her will, with one small catch: Nola has to be married within a month. But if she’s going to get married, she wants it to last. And for her, that means finding a man with as much passion as she has—who can take care of every desire, every day.

Nola finds three prime candidates: her high school sweetheart Billy, hard-dealing businessman Marc, and sexy handyman Tanner. Trying out three very different—and very desirable—men proves to be more fun than Nola imagined.

But she never thought it might prove fatal. Because someone in town is dead set against Nola sticking around. And with three new men in her bed, the danger might be closer than she thinks…

Author: Janice Maynard

Genre: Contemporary Erotic Romance

Pages: 304

Sensuality: NC-17 to X

Reason for Reading: Intrigued by Premise

Grade: D+

Ramblings:

This book is “different”. It starts with the ole must-marry-because-of-the-terms-of-the-will trope. The heroine has one month to get married and she contemplates three different men as life partners: her current lover whom she has a superficial relationship with, her high school BF whom she has unresolved feelings for, and a handyman whom she finds fixing her dead grandma’s house. Because sex is so important in a marriage, she boinks all three men throughout the course of the book.

She’s Gotta Have It has always been my favorite Spike Lee joint. For those unfamiliar w/ the movie, it’s about a woman who openly dates and have sex with three seperate men. Because of my affection for the movie and anything “different”, I was pretty sure that I wouldnt have a problem with the heroine’s owning her sexuality. And, for the most part, I didnt. I did raise my eyebrow a bit at the heroine sleeping with a different man every single day and often within hours from each encounter. Does anyone need or can manage that much sex during such a stressful time which includes working under a tight deadline and avoid getting killed?

No, it’s not the heroine’s sex drive that I have a problem with. My problem is with the fact that the she is one of the most TSTL heroines I have read in quite a while. The main subplot consists of someone trying to either gaslight or kill the braindead bitch and the way the heroine blithely ignored the threat to her life and practically runs from one near-fatal incident to another made me want to tear out my hair. She was literally driven to the hospital every single day for a new injury – carbon monoxide poisoning, car accident, food poisoning, shooting. A normal person would stay at the hospital with a bodyguard posted or get the hell out of Dodge but noooooo. I couldnt deal with such imbecility. When she made it easy for the villain to catch her and he throws her down the well, I wanted to cheer.

As for the Three Stooges that she chooses from, for the sake of the suspense plot, all of them were variously shady. None of them were written with any depth and thus were unappealing as a result. Any connection or character development consisted of just one (boring!) sex scene after another.

I really wanted to like this book but the only way the story could have been improved with such a braindead heroine was if she had died at the end.