Saturday, August 25, 2012

ARC Book Review: The Booby Trap

Author: Anne Browning Walker  
Title: The Booby Trap  
Publisher: Pixel Entertainment  
Publish Date: Sept 1, 2012  
Buy: Amazon
Review Copy Provided By: NetGalley
Book Blurb: The Booby Trap, A Pixel Entertainment Brand, is a romance novel based in The Booby Trap, a seedy bar where waitresses skirts are high, necklines are low, and customers show up for the eye candy. When brainy, beautiful, Harvard Ph.D. candidate Bambi Benson wants to study the women of the Booby Trap for her dissertation, she goes undercover and joins them. All is going well for Bambi until handsome local celebrity Trip Whitley enters the scene. Hoping to shock his high-society family by dating a bimbo, Trip offers to pay Bambi to pretend to be his girlfriend. She accepts his offer and bides her time, waiting for the right moment to reveal her true identity and teach Trip not to judge based on appearances. After a series of dates carefully orchestrated for their publicity value, Bambi sets her trap. But there is one problem: the predator might have fallen in love with her prey.  

Review: I want to first say, I think the book blurb is a bit off. I didn't think The Booby Trap was a seedy bar, the author describes it as a Hooters knock off, so I couldn't really consider that a seedy bar.

The plot is a little cliched. Bambi is really a brain, working at the bar to further her Women's Studies degree. She meets playboy Trip Whitley, whose family run a dating service and he wants to pay her to date him to piss off his family and the PR lady.

OK, that is almost a yawn, but it isn't. Somehow Anne makes this story work because the characters you spend most of the book with are really likable. Trip may be a playboy, but he isn't stupid. Bambi is a feminist but she's not without a romantic heart. The two work well together even when they are at odds.

I liked that there was more to the story then just Bambi trying to prove to Trip that people are more than what they seem on the outside. Although I have to say that some of the ways the author portrayed Bambi when she was in her "bimbo" persona were a bit over the top and I wasn't sure that everyone in the world equates bimbo with stupid.

I would have liked more information about Bambi and her mom. Yes, there's a whole lot of bad stuff between the two, but it wasn't really fleshed out enough for me. Which is pretty much how I felt about Trip and Connie, though we do know more about their relationship than that of Bambi and her mom. I think the secondary characters and the back story involved with the main characters could have had a bit more development. It would have made understanding the motives for their actions a bit more.

 It was a fun read and it had enough twists and turns that made it worth turning the pages for, a perfect summer book.

Rating: 3 flowers

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