Ron Does Stuff

It’s no secret that the American publishing industry and booksellers all over the world have ceded marketing and promotional duties of the books they’re selling to the collective known as Booktok. Which okay huge companies with kajillions of dollars, you do you.

I’m bringing this up because the second book I was able to finish this year I learned about from Booktok. Or TikTok, at the very least. Specifically, Dan Povenmire and his TikTok touting his writer’s “trashy romance novel“. Of course, I don’t have any problem with reading something trashy, especially when it comes to romance novels. I find that trashy is often used to discredit not just one work but the genre as a whole without actually digging into the work or the genre itself.

So, since Dirty South was on Kindle Unlimited anyway, I thought there wouldn’t be any harm in checking it out. Will it prove that the trashy descriptor attached to it was just a man’s anti-romance bias? Let’s find out!

Dirty South tells the story of Callie, a college graduate who’s come back to her hometown to make a name for herself and establish a career away from the long shadow of her father’s influential surname. However, she encounters a snag in her plan when she finds out that she’ll not just be working with her father’s company, but with Boone Tillman as well, a man she’s been attracted to since she was a teenager and who is eight years her senior. Boone is managing her father’s business and the two of them have no choice but to work with each other.

Despite Boone initially not recognizing her, the attraction between the two of them can’t be denied. Will the two of them be able to hold back their feelings for each other or will it be too hard to deny the chemistry between them?

In the Dan Povenmire TikTok that introduced this book to me, Celia Loren was pretty open about how she thought this book wasn’t even her best work. And now that I’ve had time to stew in my feelings and looking through my notes on the book, I really have to agree with her. The whole time I was reading this, it felt very much like a cash grab with no love — pun intended — put into it at all.

While I wouldn’t consider myself a fan of slow burn romance, the pace with which things happened in this book was too quick, even for me. Immediately thinking this girl is “something special” after a reunion that lacked chemistry is crazy. Celia can’t even count on past feelings between the characters resurfacing because the way she’s written it, the emotions were very much one-sided and wouldn’t justify the speed with which Boone falls for Callie.

This shallowness — in characterization, in plot, in local color — is something that permeates the whole book. Everything felt rushed, as if she was being time on how quickly she would hit the plot beats that you expect from a “trashy romance novel”.

That’s another thing about this work. For a “trashy” romance novel, it doesn’t even deliver on the “trash”. The sex is lacking heat bordering on antiseptic. There’s a scene where Callie gets fingered up the butt and it felt more like a hospital procedure rather than something hot. And if you can’t make getting fingered up the butt sound hot or trashy then what are doing here then?

Another thing that disappointed me was the lack of local color, especially since it’s set in the Southern United States. There so much to work with there but the city where they everything happens feels so hollow. It could have been anywhere else in the world and I wouldn’t have noticed.

By the time you get to the end of the novel you find out why everything felt so rushed — there’s another book included that they don’t tell you about. They’re padding their Kindle Unlimited reads. So there really was no love in this whole thing and it’s just a cash grab. Dirty South really did deserve that trashy descriptor after all.