Paradise by Judith McNaught

DNF @ p.175

Dammit, I wanted to love this book. Judith McNaught has been recommended to me so many times and when I found out that this book has some of my favorite tropes (hero wants revenge, rich/poor match, second chance but as enemies, etc.), I was like YES YES YES. But reading this book... was not all that fun. It has the same trashy vibes as one of those Harlequin Presents novels from the 1980s and 1990s, or a Jackie Collins novel without the fun sleaze that makes her books so addictive. It was all melodrama.

Basically, the heroine is the rich daughter of a man who owns an entire chain of department stores but he's sent her to poor school to build character. Everyone hates her for being rich and the only person she can become friends with is a walking Italian stereotype who's super smart and thinks her chauffeur is her dad. When she finds out she's been tricked she's mad for one hot minute and then is like YOLO. Heroine is "ugly" because she has straight blonde hair and glasses, but as soon as the glasses come off and she waves her hair, suddenly everyone is like OMG YOU'RE SO HOT. Oh, and she's a giantess at 5'7". *epic eye-roll* Ask me how tall I am, princess.

The hero, meanwhile, is a working class boy named Matt who has huge issues and basically takes those issues out by sleeping with rich women as a way of flipping the bird to the entitled rich guys he hates. Which is why it's so ironic that he falls for our heroine, Meredith, at a party, precisely because she's ~so much more than she seems~ and also she sleeps with him because she's mad at her father and decides to flip the bird to entitled rich guys because fuck Daddy (not literally, this isn't that kind of book). Only he's annoyed when it's him getting used because he's a man dammit... but only for a hot minute because there's a baby and they have to get married! Single moms are so declasse!

I love a soapy drama as much as the next girl, but this was just way too boring and the characters didn't have any depth. I was hoping for something like Meagan McKinney, who wrote a story kind of like this one that was historical, but her writing was heartwrenching and torturous and I couldn't put it down, even though her books were pretty long as well. This was a slog and now I am done.

1 out of 5 stars