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Book Review: Big Moves

Genre: Modern

Number of words: 6,660

Average Goodreads Rating: 3/5 Stars

My rating: 1/5 stars

Jolene Franks and Sam Caldwell have been ready to get married for a year. But thanks to both of them being deployed, the wedding was postponed. Until now. Finally, they can take a break from the military long enough for a honeymoon, but they will never stop being patriotic in the service of their country.

This book could have been so good. There’s an amazing military heroine, a long-awaited reunion, and even some (almost) steamy sex scenes, as well as a honeymoon in Hawaii. Oh yeah, this book had potential, which is probably why I’m so mad at it right now.

I don’t even know where to start with this crazy storm of horror. There’s the rushed love story, the barrage of characters at the end (because this is just an introductory novel for the “real” books in the series, with the other characters), and the patriotic morals that shove me down the throat.

There’s no reason this story should be under 15,000 words. It was all so rushed that I couldn’t even care about Jolene and Sam when they got married. Then the honeymoon in Hawaii was overlooked. And trust me, you can’t overlook a honeymoon in Hawaii. Always. No matter how laid-back, you don’t go from one flight to the next without mentioning at least one romp in the sheets, or a luau, or something in between.

The sex scenes in this story could have been good, but for some reason they just weren’t, not even when the two joined the mile high club. Maybe because the writing style wasn’t my favorite, or I just wasn’t that attached to the characters, but they just weren’t. I didn’t get an iota of pleasure from these scenes and they took up about half of the story.

The other half appeared to be patriotic propaganda. There was a lot of that. There were at least four patriotic songs played and everywhere I look there’s some mention about how there’s nothing quite as patriotic as serving your country, and how they’re so proud to be patriotic, and it’s sexy when you jump down someone’s throat saying United United is not perfect. It is as if the author used a military recruitment poster as a writing message and published it as is.

Do not misunderstand. I have complete respect for the troops. And the United States is nowhere near the worst country in the world to live in. But it’s not Narnia either. There are many things wrong with America, including the large number of homeless veterans. So having all these “patriotic” characters pisses me off.

I get that this is going to be a show about a family that loves the military, but that doesn’t mean the story has to be preachy. There could have been a lot more character development to balance out the patriotism and then it wouldn’t have been a problem for me. But as things stand now, the main characters have about as much depth as an Uncle Sam poster and I can feel the moral of the story hitting me in the head as hard as a two by four and it’s not a good feeling.

Morales is totally fine in the stories. In small doses. If it’s obvious enough that it affects the story, then there’s a problem. The patriotic moral here is more apparent than the moral in the beginner chapter books I used to read to a child. The moral should be much more subtle for an audience old enough to know what a blow job is.

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