Chapter 11: A Book That Takes Place In Your Hometown

Neanderthal seeks Human,

Penny Reid

I'm only 11 entries in and I'm already fudging a little bit. The nice thing about being a nomad for the majority of your life is that you can claim a number of places as home. Lucky for me, I had a kindle book set in Chicago and I once had an address in the City of the Big Shoulders. Because, let's be honest, there are not a lot of interesting books taking place in Tupelo, MS or LaPorte, IN. Yet. And there are too many titles in Los Angeles. I did once read a mystery set in High Point, NC, but I'm not ready to re-read for this journal. Yet. So, I opened up this one that I got as a freebie.

I'm not even sure how or why I got this one for free, but it is much better than many other freebies I have read stared at. I think calling it a smart romance might be a stretch, but that is far more accurate than calling this series "Knitting in the City." The main character doesn't even knit! She goes to her friend's knitting group three times in the whole book, mostly just for girltalk. There is brief mention of projects-on-needles and a ball of MadTosh, but if the rest of the series is about Janie, the publisher should seriously reconsider the series name. Maybe Awkward Girl in the City.

We meet Janie on the Worst Day of Her Life. She broke up with her cheating boyfriend, got fired, and now has nowhere to live (see cheating boyfriend). She takes her meager possessions to her friend's apartment for alcohol and ice cream. They talk about the most important event of the day- riding in an elevator with a hot security guy. Like many overzealous crushes, this one has been knighted Sir (Something-Something) Hotpants. Really, it's so dumb I can't be bothered to remember or look it up. But these are young, single women and I can't pretend I didn't suffer my own boy crazy phase.

Except Janie is not really the boy crazy type. She's a Curator of Fact with a dysfunctional mental/verbal filter. She doesn't recognize obvious flirting and innuendo. She is not social. She also repeatedly talks about how ugly and monstrous she is. Yeah. Big boobs and long legs are gross. Despite all this, her friend takes her to an Outrageous night club where people are fornicating in glass cages. I'll let you guess who happens to be working security there, too. It's Hotpants. Are you gobsmacked? Janie sure is.

From here, all other characters are peripheral and we watch a bizarre courtship between the two. So many things make no sense at all. It is so incohesive and implausible. I kept waiting for The Thing that brings it all together, but it never appeared. And then the resolution (if that's even the right term) comes out of nowhere and ends abruptly. I am still so disoriented, that I have no interest in reading more of the series because I do not care about any of the characters. Plus, THERE'S NO KNITTING!

What did I enjoy? Hotpants (whose name is Quinn Sullivan and can never be separated in my mind from this guy)



sends Janie nerd jokes via text. I chuckled at the binary one. I also found some of the facts Janie blurts out at inappropriate times to be interesting, although I still need to check some of them. (Here is where I'd like to point out that being able to recite things from memory is not exactly the same thing as smart. It can be if one can then apply it to appropriate situations, but Janie can't.) And I like that, despite having some sparky bits, it doesn't go into detail about all the humping. Which brings me to a tangent.

At one point, Janie's friend (I'm sure she has a name, but she's totally forgettable) says that she knows Janie didn't like sex with her ex-boyfriend because she never talked about it. This has been running around in my brain for days now. Maybe it's the difference between married and singles sex. Maybe it's an age thing. Maybe my friends and I are all prudes. But I just don't witness many conversations about sex. I'm not really interested in grabbing a margarita with a gal pal and exchanging play by plays of our most recent romps. This leads me to believe that I'm not really the target audience for this series. There are worse things in life, I suppose.

So I've been trying to come up with a rating system for this journal- a way to quickly see what I liked and didn't, what I recommend you pick up or burn. So far nothing has really been quite what I am looking for, but a friend suggested this.

So until I come up with something better, which I may never do, I give Neanderthal  2.5 Marias. It was easy to read, didn't take much time or gray matter, didn't make me fall asleep, nor did it make any sense. I won't read it again or continue the series, but I don't hate myself for reading the whole thing, and I won't be sending glitterbombs to the author.