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 set to get married for a year. But thanks to both of them fanning out, the wedding was postponed. Until now. They may finally 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 morality shoved down my throat.

There’s no reason this story should be less than 15,000 words. It was all so rushed that I couldn’t even worry about Jolene and Sam when they got married. Then the honeymoon in Hawaii was overlooked. And believe me, you don’t pass up a honeymoon in Hawaii. Ever. No matter how sedate it is, you don’t go from one flight to the next without mentioning at least a 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 as 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 the story.

The other half seemed to be patriotic propaganda. There was a lot of it. At least four patriotic songs were played and everywhere I look, there’s some mention of 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 the throat of someone who says America isn’t perfect. It is as if the author used a military recruiting poster as a writing prompt and posted it as is.

Do not misunderstand. I have complete respect for the troops. And America 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 series about a family that loves the military, but that doesn’t mean the story needs 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 it is now, the main characters have as much depth as an Uncle Sam poster and I can feel the moral of the story hitting me over 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 is a problem. The patriotic moral here is more apparent than the moral in the beginner chapter books I used to read for a kid. The moral should be much more subtle for an audience old enough to know what a blow job is.