Saturday, February 2, 2013

Review: On The Plus Side by Tabatha Vargo

One the Plus Side by Tabatha Vargo
Genre: New Adult Contemporary  Romance
Rating: Four Scoops!

Big girls need love, too, but at what cost?

Lilly is loaded, not only with money, but with weight. Both things she could do without. But even with her undesired millionaire status, she doesn’t hold on to false hopes of finding true love. So when a sexy stranger comes into her life dripping with seduction, she finds it hard to resist. The bigger they are the harder they fall and Lilly falls straight through the floor in love with Mr. Sexy. Too bad he’s there for all the wrong reasons.

The chance of losing it all will make you do some crazy things and Devin’s willing to do whatever it takes to keep his life together. All seems lost when out of nowhere he’s approached by a Millionaire Momma with an offer he can’t refuse. But even a womanizer like Devin has a heart and when the short, chunky girl with the carefree attitude breaks through his icy façade, he finds that losing everything takes on a whole new meaning.

Delicious Details!

So I jumped the pile a little on this one, but I was just so excited to read an upbeat NA! This book's been getting some buzz and rightly so. It's fun, sexy, and an all-around good time. We have an equal balance of serious themes to the funny and I just get a kick out of that!

We have a plus size gal who happens to be a rich heiress. She's self-conscious about her weight, which makes it hard for her to nab a man. In comes in the delicious Devin. He's been bribed to date our heiress by her mother. In return, mom will pay his debts. Little did he know that he would fall for her making it nearly impossible to stick to the deal. 

The whole thing sounds crazy, right? But it works. And oh-so-well!

The Tasty Highs!

Now some people have been giving this book a lot of flack for it's unbelievably, (a mom paying a guy to date her daughter), but a crazy concept like this is what I love about romantic comedies and why I shell out the dough to continue seeing movies like The Wedding Planner! They're fun and should be taken with a grain of salt. This book was amazing and I loved how we got to see both the happy and sad sides of heroine Lily and her hero Devin. We watched these two fall in love, a love that wasn't based off the instant attraction, but real meaningful love. Seeing Devin's struggles with the deal and his hurtful past and seeing Lily's struggles with self-image and acceptance I could feel the the whole way through. 

This book was hilarious at times, then made you grab tissues in the next second. It's great balanced read that gives the readers something different today in NA!

A Few Things that Soured the Flavor...

This book was self-published and there is nothing wrong with that, but the typos and grammatical and formatting errors were distracting at times. Front quotes would be missing and just incorrect tag usage that could have been cleaned up were sprinkled throughout the novel. The book also had tense issues (switching from present to past) that could have easily been corrected with a good read through.

There was lots of narrative summary and telling versus showing. I felt I could have seen the characters grow more if I got to see certain things. An example is the couple's first date. I saw none of it. We breezed through and a scene was shown at the end of the date at Lily's apartment. This also messed with my sense of time passage. I felt like lots more time passed than was being explained in the text, which can lead to plot holes.

Speaking of...

Plot holes. I did find a few. Like why after Devin made arrangements to have his loan paid, did his dad not ask where he got the money? Things like that. Nothing too big though and I thought the story was still great despite the issues.

The Completed Sundae!

Rating: Four Scoops :)