On Location by Sarah Echavarre Smith
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
**1.5-stars rounded up**
On Location has been on my TBR for 2021. On a whim last week, I decided to read it for a Romance Readathon I was participating in. I started it with the best of hopes, even though it’s overall rating isn’t particularly high.
I’m not a picky Reader, and frequently end up enjoying things others may not have. However, about 20% into this one, I knew that wasn’t going to be the case. In fact, I figured I might end up liking it even less than others.
A few friends advised me to DNF, but I rarely DNF. Sometimes, the saltier something makes me, the more I want to keep reading, with thoughts of, how did this even get published swirling in my head.
Honestly, there’s nothing like a rage read to keep you flipping pages. I disliked so much about this book, so I am going to do something a little different with this review. Instead of wasting time going through details, I will just share some of my status updates I posted while reading it to give you a general idea of my experience:
18% — “Wow. Alia (the main character) is a terrible manager of people. You manage by leading, not angrily bossing people around. She’s a tyrant. Besides her cringe management attempts however, I am enjoying this! We’ll see what happens 👀”
At this point, as you can see, I was remaining positive…
25% — “I hate this MC. She has zero emotional intelligence and shouldn’t be in a upper management position. I would fire her yesterday.”
26% — “Seriously, reading this MC thinking about how she needs to talk to others about their professionalism is so laughable. Did the author do this on purpose? She realizes she’s made her MC, who is supposed to be this strong woman in charge, act like a child throwing a temper tantrum every 5-mins, right?”
32% — “I’m 100% rage reading this right now. I hate it.”
42% — “That was the stupidest OTT fight ever. My eyes hurt from all the rolling.”
47% — “Holy shit. This dialogue is sooooo cringe. Good Lord.”
69% — “Alia’s 7th-grade persona went away for a couple of chapters, but she’s back with a vengeance now 🙄”
86% — “Oh my god 😳 seriously!? Alia is sooooo ridiculous 🙄 I cannot with the fact that she is supposed to be in her 30s!?”
And that pretty much sums it up. There were two scenes in the 2nd-half I thought were good, a sexting scene in a shared condo and a hot tub scene. Other than that, I was annoyed each and every page by one thing or another.
You know in Junior High school when there’s a school dance, and a boy that a girl likes ends up paying attention to another girl, and the next thing you know, half the girls in the class are running in and out of the bathroom, crying and blubbering and living their ultimate dramatic lives?
That was this MC.
At the end of the day, happy to cross it off the list and clear up some space on my kindle. I’m now going to block it from my mind forever.
Berkley, I love you. Thank you for providing me a copy of this all those years ago. I love so, so, so many Berkley Romances, past and present, but this was not it for me.
