Mini Review: The Virgin's Night Out by Shiloh Walker

Title: The Virgin's Night Out
Author: Shiloh Walker

Date of publication: 6 April 2015
Genre: Romance

Author's links:
Website / Facebook / Twitter / Goodreads

My rating: 2 stars

Synopsis

Sloane Redding is the shy one, the timid one. The morning of her wedding, she's dumped by the man she'd thought she'd spend the rest of her life with. Humiliated, she turns tail and runs, leaving Nowhere, Alabama for a job in the city. Sloane sets out to remake herself. She succeeds...on the outside. On the inside? Different story. She still the shy Redding. Still quiet, still more interested in standing on the standlines. But all of that is about to change.

The night before her brother's wedding, she strolls in the lone bar in Nowhere wearing wicked red and she's got one goal in mind: to show her ex-fiance just what he lost.

The night before his best friend's wedding, D.B. "Boone" Cassidy walks into the lone bar in Nowhere, Alabama with one goal in mind. Get wasted. Former military, he's spent the past few years as a security specialist and all around troubleshooter. It should have been easy to spot the trouble that night...a sexy woman in wicked red. It should have been easy. Yeah, right.

One thing leads to another and his plans to get wasted turn into a night with the sexy woman in red . Boone gets the shock of his life the next day when he shows up at his friend's wedding to find out he'd just spent the night wrapped around his best friend's little sister...and that isn't the only surprise.

Mini Review

This is my 4th book by Shiloh Walker and while I quite enjoyed all the previous ones, this was a great disappointment for me. 

It's a novella-length story which started promising with a revenge one-night stand between strangers but things quickly went downhill for me. The blurb doesn't really reveal much of the actual story so I'll try to keep my review spoiler-free which will inevitably make it a bit vague.

I felt the story lacked depth, too many things happened and they were just skimmed over without being fully fleshed out. The same holds true about the characters - there was no real spark to make me engaged in their fates. 

The heroine was annoying pretty much from the start and she went making one wrong decision after another. Sloane outright lied to Boone and the fact that she tried to convinced herself and the others that it wasn't so based on semantics really put me off. Boone's character was more interesting and I felt more sympathetic with his situation. Yet again his plot arc lacked depth and detail and I couldn't fully connect with him, either.

The first encounter between them involved a whole bunch of tropes and stereotypes which I personally don't enjoy in my romances. The way the romantic relationship developed or rather, the lack of a real relationship was frustrating.

The ending was quite abrupt and just added to my dissatisfaction with this story. It had great potential but I felt it was wasted. The story went in a direction which I didn't really liked - based on lies, half-truths and miscommunication. The main conflict seemed fabricated and I didn't really feel the tension and intrigue to keep me interested in the story.

It was a quick and easy read, just not for me.

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