Review: A Wish, A Kiss, a Dream by various

Title: A Wish, A Kiss, A Dream
Authors: Shiloh Walker, Mary Wine, and Lorra Leigh
Genre: Erotic romance
Reason for Reading: I think I got this because someone told me I’d like Shiloh Walker.
Grade: C-

I’ve had a pretty good reading month thus far, but it was bound not to last.

The anthology starts with “Djinn’s Wish” by Shiloh Walker, which tells the story of Cat, an artist who was blinded in a car wreck. She inherits a magic mirror and the amorous attentions of Tam, the djinn trapped inside the mirror, who grants wishes and kisses to women. Naturally, Tam, our dginn, is drawn to Cat’s sweetness and the fact that she’s suffered. A lot. But will he risk everything to be with her?

My Thoughts: I would have loved this story if it had not featured an issue (blindness) of which I know a bit. Walker manages to incorporate a lot of the details of life as a blind person, but she could have used a blind beta reader to go over those passages. (Authors take note: I can’t possibly think of a single blind person who would be willing to do this. Nope, nobody at all.) And I probably don’t need to tell you about the end and the manner in which Cat’s eyesight is dealt with. I knew it was going to happen and yet, there was eyerolling action happening.

It’s a testament to the fact that I pretty much did like Walker’s protagonists that I was able to get past the things that kept throwing me out of the story. I’ll give this a C+ and try another Walker effort that doesn’t have this plot.

Actually, compared to the rest of the anthology, Walker is freaking Shakespeare, because the rest of the anthology was even more underwhelming.

Next we have “Paying Up” by Mary Wine. This seems to be linked to some other story, and I’m not really sure my heart can take any more of this universe, so if you want to start at the beginning of this series, I’d recommend you do your own googling.

Synopsis: Shane Jacobs is a military man who works for a super-sekret military organization that doesn’t exist. We are never told what he does, although I have a hunch it involves the pr0n channel and a lot of Astroglide. I think he might be psychic, or a werewolf or something, although I was confused on this point. Or maybe it’s that he has psychic friends, although, sadly for everyone, Dionne Warwick does not make an appearance in this story. Included among these friends, incidentally, is the heroine of the last book, who has a random inexplicable appearance here just to assure people that she’s still happy, which is great except I do not care. Anyway, Shane’s obsessed in an alpha romance hero kind of way with Christina, who he apparently rescued from bad guys in the previous book and who he had some kind of bet with. If she survived being shot, he would come claim a kiss from her. And so, in order to cash in on this bet, Shane does all the things you’d expect him to do: he buys her flowers, takes her to the movies and writes her beautiful love letters… Oh, wait, this is a romance novel. What I meant to say is he gropes her like she’s his winning lottery ticket.

OK, so here’s the thing. You can have an alpha male who is so obsessed with the heroine that she’s a little afraid of him and yet strangely drawn to him. I am told that Anne Stuart does a good job with this, although I’ve never read her so don’t take my word on it. Anyway, I would think that this would require two very well-drawn characters, and probably a very intense set of circumstances that would draw them together.

This story? Does not feature anything of the sort. We just have an alpha ape-man direct from Central Casting, and a feisty heroine. Cthulhu save me from feisty heroines! Even the sex starts out pretty well, but goes very bad as the author tries to figure out whether she wants to write purple, flowery romancey sex or earthy erotica sex. The balance she strikes is not a joy to read.

This story did have its pluses. You can never go too wrong with unintentional hillarity, and I giggled helplessly at points. Like everytime the author wrote “passage” in a sex scene. But since that wasn’t the sort of reaction the author intended, that’s not saying much.

With wooden characters, writing that was fairly awful at times, and a plot with more holes in it than a doughnut rack at Krispy Kremes, this one rates a C-.
The third story, “The Cowboy and the Thief” by Lorra Leigh, I didn’t even bother finishing. Leigh is inexplicably popular for reasons known only to her fangirls. The last thing I read by her, a short story in the “Hot Spell” anthology, featured a shrewish woman who falls in love with an uber-alpha with a barbed penis. This story features a shrewish female who is trying to recover a torque her father sold to an American cowboy. When Jack Riley refuses to be convinced that the torque is a precious heirloom, Angel decides to do what you or I would do in this situation, namely eat a lot of chocolate, mutter darkly to herself about what a creep this guy is for buying a family heirloom and plotting making sure her father, who sold said torque, ends up in a shithole nursing home… Except, again, this is a romance novel, so she breaks into Jack’s house in order to retrieve the torque. Jack, of course, is totally aware of this, and proceeds to molest her until, one assumes, they fall in love. I, however, will not be finding out what happens, because after chapter 1 sets up this ridiculous premise, I decided that there was no way I could get through the rest of the story.

So, the anthology as a whole? With one sort of pleasant story, one laughably bad story, and one so awful it makes my head hurt, I would recommend skipping this one. Grade: C-.