Review: Vain by Deborah Bladon

Vain by Deborah Bladon
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

To sum it up: Sex. 

That's all Noah Foster wanted when Alexa Jackson showed up at his apartment. 

After returning from a semester in Paris, Alexa is back in her hometown of Boston and looking for anything but the drama that surrounds Noah. He's intense, gifted, famous and a bastard through and through. 

Alexa doesn't take life too seriously. Noah doesn't do calm and easygoing. 

Their unexpected meeting sets them both on a course towards an unlikely connection. As Noah embarks on a journey to teach school teacher Alexa the ways of his dark and mysterious world, she's fighting her own demons and the memory of a stranger in Paris. 

When Alexa's past suddenly becomes her present, she's forced to face the reality of whether the passionate moments she's spent in Noah's arms, in his bed, and in his life mean anything to him, or has it all been in vain?

★★ 2 Stars! ★★

So, the cover is some extremely nice eye candy to look at… It’s just too bad that it’s about the only enjoyable aspect to the book. I’ve read in a few reviews that the hero was a real asshole… As an avid fan of asshole heroes, this one was actually not really what I'd consider jerk material which was the ultimate let-down, unfortunately. The hero Noah actually came across as a little creepy, in my opinion.

I mean, the man was a photographer who took pictures of naked women while he was also in the nude. It was just weird. How in the hell am I supposed to swoon over a character who enjoys photographing nude women with his junk swinging around every which way? To be fair, if I had known that he was a photographer in the first place before even starting the book I probably would have never picked it up. It’s just not what I’d consider a drool-worthy career, so I’d be lying if I didn’t say that that little detail turned me off a bit in the first place.

I don’t really have much to say about the heroine, Alexa. In all honesty, there just wasn’t anything really interesting about her character at all which made it hard to believe that Noah felt like she was different from any other woman that’s been apart of his life. It was obvious that he had a play-boy past, so the only conclusion I can come up with was that she had some kind of golden vagina that we were unaware of. It was just the only logical explanation that I could come up with as to what made her so "special."

As for plot detail... I got nothing. This kind of things tends to happen in stories that aren't even a hundred pages long. Very few authors can pull off writing a short novella that packs a punch with a lot of depth- This not being one of them.

Over-all, this book was just extremely shallow and lacked some major depth. Hence, the reason I don't have much to say in this review. Usually I avoid novellas for those particular reasons alone, but I was being a cover whore and decided to give this one the benefit of a doubt anyway. Unfortunately for me, it ended up being nothing more than a quick read with more sex than story, no character development and only a tiny bit of intrigue. Oh, and it also ends on a major cliffhanger… You’ve been warned.


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