Review: Loving Lana by A.B. Marie

Loving Lana by A.B. Marie

Publication date: June 15th, 2021

Pages: 427

Spice: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️

Synopsis:

My name is Lana White. When I was four years old, my mother dragged me to Wallen's Creek. A small, nowhere town in California... Where there is no creek. Hell, my high school only had three hundred kids max... Far away from LA where I grew up. I was told that my father didn't want me. That we were stuck, trapped. I start to build a life for myself, I was going to become a lawyer... And then my neglectful, strung out mother moves us across the country to get married to some psycho that found her online dating site... and now we're fucked.

Loving Lana is a 126k word stand-alone novel. This is a reverse harem, meaning the main character has more than three love interests and doesn't have to choose. Why choose, anyway?

This book is intended for readers over the age of 18. There may be triggers for sensitive readers, including, strong language, mature adult content and situations, trauma, and pregnancy.

Also included: taboo relationships - stepbrother, professor, childhood best friend, and stepbrother's best friends in the harem.

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Review:

Lana White went from riches to rages overnight when she was four years old. In the middle of the night her mother whisked her away to an unknown town far from home. She was told her father had abandoned them and Lana accepted that as it wasn't like the man was beating down their door looking for her. Her mother was an addict who treated her like garbage. She hated Lana and wished to make her life miserable at every turn. She was ready to turn 18 and head off to college so she could start her life for herself. But everything gets twisted and turned on its head when Lana's mother meets a man on a dating site and decides to move her and her daughter to where he lived. Lana was skeptical and creeped out by her soon-to-be new stepfather. So much so that she willingly accepted a place at the college penthouse where her new stepbrother lived with his best friends. Once she got there she realized one person living there was a friend from her past and the others were his beautiful roommates that she couldn't help but eye fuck at ever turn. But there is definitely something wrong with her arrangement. Her stepfather seems a little too intrigued by her. Her mother seems a little worse off than she was before. And someone is after Lana. Can she unravel the mystery of what is happening with her new family while sharks seem to be circling and her protectors become the men she thought wanted nothing to do with her?

I know that my review of this book is going to be harsh but I will try to offer some good points first. The mystery was interesting. There were a lot of cooks in the kitchen which made it a little hard to figure out who all were the baddies and who were just casualties of the plot, but I never had the plot pegged down until towards the end because it was so vague a lot of the time. 

Unfortunately that is all the good I can offer. As there were so many things wrong with his book. The formatting for one. The amount of run on sentences in this book should have its own drinking game. You'd be smashed by chapter two. I have never seen the word 'and' so many times. "She walked to the living room and looked out the window and saw a pretty flower and admired its beauty." Just an example not an actual quote.

The pacing of the book was all over the place. One minute it was moving like a jack rabbit and the next like a turtle. It would be scrambling to keep track of what all is going on and then dulled to tears by a bunch of nothing happening. I swear towards the end when they were hiding it was months and months of just... nothing. No moves forward. No steps back. Just stagnant nothingness. 

And finally, the romances. Usually in reverse harems there is a set of boys that the girl gets with and that is it. It was like the author got her with those boys and then said, 'well, I need new sex scenes and I don't want to repeat any with the same boy so, TWO new boys!' They were just thrown into the mix all willy-nilly. No really building to Lana's connection with them just, well they're part of the harem now. I loathed everything about their harem. It just was not organized by any means and in a normal setting someone would start to feel neglected. I just hated it.

The only reason I am not giving this book one star is because while the ending was predictable there were a few twists and turns I didn't see coming. But even so... I would not recommend this book to anyone until it has gone through a proper editor and revamped a bit.