Unstuck Pages

What’s a campaign manager’s worst nightmare? A smooth-talking charmer who’s never met a scandal that he didn’t like.

When Emmanuelle Peroni’s father—and mayor of her town—asks her to help rehab Cooper Endicott’s image, she’s horrified. Cooper drives her crazy in every way possible. But he’s also her father’s protégé, and she can’t say no to him without him finding out the reason why: Cooper and her have a messy past. So Emmanuelle reluctantly launches her father’s grand plan to get this Casanova someone to settle down with and help him lose his lothario reputation.

Cooper Endicott wanted to run for Mayor, but he never wanted the drama that went with it. Now that he’s on the political hamster wheel, the other candidates are digging up everything from his past. Even though he’s doing all the right things, his colorful love life is the sticking point for many of the conservative voters. He wants to win, badly, and he knows that if he wants any chance of getting a vote from the female population, he needs to change his image. The only problem? He might just be falling in love with the one person he promised not to pursue: the Mayor’s off-limits daughter.

A poor little rich boy known for his womanising ways needs someone to keep him in hand. After all, his mayoral ambitions are in jeopardy. Who better to do so, than a longtime friend who always had the hots for him but was cruelly subject to his numerous hookups over the years, to become his campaign manager and keep him on the straight and narrow for better media reception of the reformed manwhore?

That should have been my warning sign.

Some books do get better as you go on. For others, you get a sinking, cringey feel from the very start.

Unfortunately, ‘On the Corner of Love and Hate’ fell into the latter category. Admittedly, I wish I’d given the blurb more than just a side-eye before I’d even begun, but it was Nina Bocci and I wanted to have an enthusiastic go at her attempt at romantic dramedy.

Shallowly flaky, lacking moral fibre and substance, Cooper was a manchild with manwhoring ways, made even unforgivable because his weakness for women was something he was unrepentant about—not that he seemed to make any effort to get together with Emma. Having this thrown in my face time and time again made the story hard to go on with, let alone the excruciating pining that Emma had going for decades (!) for someone who always supposedly wanted her but took it up with many many other women instead because he was either ‘young and stupid’ or trying to get her attention and having the best of both worlds. That there was the constant presence of a college fling and a now friends-with-benefits secondary character—a typical mean, beautiful but bitchy one—made the entire story feel like a pool of circling sharks hungry for blood and a piece of Cooper’s arrogant arse.

As a result, there was little of the romance I saw, more so because this was entirely written in Emma’s POV, of Emma’s own jealousy and well-hidden hurts as the pages wore on and her perception of Cooper’s lack of initiative for anything except for flirting and women.

Perhaps this was done, ironically, too well. Bocci’s writing keeps you outraged on Emma’s behalf, frustrated by her own attraction that she can’t seem to shake off. So much so that the attempt to position Cooper as a ‘good man’ with a half-hearted rationale of his behaviour over the years to show some redeemable qualities in him merely left me with the poorest impression of a character who shouldn’t have even been a worthy of the status of a romantic hero.

That Emma fell like a house of cards after spending a hot night with him made her no better than the other women who were ready to fling their panties at him at the sight of his gigawatt smile.

I couldn’t do it. I skimmed, skipped, and cringed too much to be able to go on, then finally threw it in.