The Mister - E L James
London, 2019. Life has been easy for Maxim Trevelyan. With his good looks, aristocratic connections, and money, he’s never had to work and he’s rarely slept alone. But all that changes when tragedy strikes and Maxim inherits his family’s noble title, wealth, and estates, and all the responsibility that entails. It’s a role he’s not prepared for and one that he struggles to face.
But his biggest challenge is fighting his desire for an unexpected, enigmatic young woman who’s recently arrived in England, possessing little more than a dangerous and troublesome past. Reticent, beautiful, and musically gifted, she’s an alluring mystery, and Maxim’s longing for her deepens into a passion that he’s never experienced and dares not name. Just who is Alessia Demachi? Can Maxim protect her from the malevolence that threatens her? And what will she do when she learns that he’s been hiding secrets of his own?
From the heart of London through wild, rural Cornwall to the bleak, forbidding beauty of the Balkans, The Mister is a roller-coaster ride of danger and desire that leaves the reader breathless to the very last page.
But what I wanted her to do was take all of that money she earned and hire a god damn EDITOR and find a publisher that actually gave an ACTUAL DAMN about the quality of book coming out with their stamp of approval on it. Seriously. Either one would do, both would have been nice.
Before I get into this book I'm going to tell you it ends with every loop not being closed so I would bet everything in me this ends up a trilogy as well. It was set up as such, it ends almost on a similar ending as Fifty Shades and even the story line mimics it with the danger element. And while I'm going to sound like a total tool talking about this book, you have to know me enough by now to know I will read the rest of the trilogy because I have poor impulse control, I'm a sucker for a series, and my OCD legitimately will not allow me to skip out.
And I hate myself for it.
In this book we have Maxim, and he's fresh from the death of his brother. Their parents had "an heir and a spare" when they had kids and you can guess that Maxim is the spare. He's a bit of a playboy with his hand in a lot of different things but no direction, really. Then we have Alessia, clearly an illegal immigrant who finds herself in London after some kind of horrible experience and through a connection of a friend, she ends up as Maxim's "daily", which is housekeeper for us American folk.
I cannot tell you how many times Maxim thinks about her "ghastly blue housecoat and scarf" SO MANY TIMES throughout the god damn book that it's absurd. It could be mentioned once and as a reader with short term memory loss, even I could remember that's what she wears when she cleans. We are continually hammered at how poor Alessia is as if at some point we should look at Maxim as the best guy ever because look- he looked past all her ugly to find her worth. Get the hell out of here with that. Secondly, the book changes voices constantly. It's forever switching between first and third person, sometimes in the same chapter and it's absolutely frustrating to read. I just want to get through the damn book, you know?
If it's any indication of how this book is, the term "fuck a duck" happens in the first 50 pages and a few more times throughout.
While I did manage to finish this, and the second part kind of got a little better in thanks to the pages dedicated to them having sex, this is a solid 2 start book. I even have to mention the sex was only meh. If you are expecting scenes like what you got in Fifty Shades, turn all the way around and run because you will not find that here. There is one small part where he uses handcuffs on another girl and has a one sentence thought that Alessia wouldn't be ready for that but then you never hear anything more about that. Oh god- don't get me started on the "forbidden room" that you absolutely can never go into. I got excited and then NOPE, just wait until you see what it is. Honest to shit I have never been more disappointed in my whole life. Honestly I've read books that have been independently published as a PDF only that are edited far better. Frankly, I'm a little taken aback at how unrefined this book is given the magnitude of success Fifty Shades had brought in, I would think E L James' next book would warrant the best of the best and that's absolutely not what we have here.
The entire story feels hokey and bizarre? It's like modern day Cinderella meets Pretty Woman, kind of. She's illegal, he's a rich Earl but she doesn't know it, they fall in love, she plays piano well and has broken English, he takes her in and decides hiding his identity is the best situation, she's got sex traffickers and her betrothed after her, it takes a weird fucking turn when he goes to Albania, the whole thing is such a bizarre story that you almost keep reading just to see where the actual hell is she going? Then it ends on a damn cliffhanger which guarantees more is to come. It really feels like E L James wanted to really go there, really push the envelope and show what she can really do, and she fell so far short of that. Honestly, I think she'll get to finish this trilogy but then this might be the end. Unless she can really ramp up the next books and hire a better team for it, I don't know if we'll read more from her in the future.
All in all? Don't buy it. Truly. If you really can't stop yourself from reading it, wait for a library copy, borrow it from a friend, wait until it's free on Kindle, something but spend your money on something more worthy.