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A review by dith_kusu
Wedlocked by Ella Frank, Brooke Blaine
2.0
I guess if I had read all of these two authors' series beforehand, and been invested in all the lengthy character cameos, I would appreciate this book more. But I haven't, and as this book was, it was padded out with really long meandering asides like video recordings of their bachelor party featuring all their friends and acquaintances from the authors' other works, just dragging on with lots of descriptions and hanging out until their wedding. I liked the sweet epilogue of them adopting a child but this could've easily been the ending of a second book. If I liked all the people, I wouldn't have minded a fanfiction style just pages and pages of them all casually interacting Avengers-style, but I really didn't care too much and found that their whole story could've been more condensed into a tighter but more compelling narrative instead of three publications that don't really stand on their own each as novels. I found myself disappointed at the bareness of the celebrity world that Dylan and Ace inhabit too, where everything was very unbelievable and comes across very fanficky. I always prefer more of a fleshing out of the universe that characters inhabit when it comes to published romance that I actually purchase or take the time to borrow, while I can be more blase about the varying quality of free fanfiction out on the internet. So this final work, and this series in general, is more of a miss for me. Not sure if I would try out the authors' other works continuing from here, since I'm not so keen on this and Ella Frank's recent series about the primetime news anchor bodyguard pairing that also had the same pitfalls as this (dragged out unnecessarily into three books, lackluster romance, unconvincing newscasting media world, lots more emphasis on their sexual aspect of their relationship that was meh to read for me because their chemistry was more plot progression than a fully developed and realized thing). I might give one of their series a chance sometime.