Summer Sundays: Beach Reads #5 / #6 - Under the Boardwalk, by Carly Phillips

I feel like a jerk. A week ago I posted my brief review of Carly Phillips' Under the Boardwalk. The review, as posted, was snide and condescending. The fact is, it was written more than a week after I'd finished the book, it was written late at night, and I wanted to meet my self-imposed deadline. It wasn't until this afternoon that I realized my stupid mistake: I had actually written another brief review immediately after finishing the book, and I had saved it to one of my jump drives at work, and then proceeded to completely forget about it. In that version, the version I'm posting this week, the tone is softer, more willing to accept some jaunty chick-lit that never pretends to be anything more than it is. And while my opinion is still consistent (i.e. it still lacks much of a beach, and it still lacks some believability), I think it only fair that I now post my original (very brief, very to-the-point) review, as was intended.

Review: Under the Boardwalk, by Carly Phillips

Ah, finally we arrive at the chick-lit portion of this week's programming. And there’s a beach in it. Kind of. It’s really thrown in for somewhat dramatic effect, but it doesn’t factor in to the book too much. All the same, it’s got your undercover cop, your twin sister with opposite personalities (although it turns out that both of them are kind of hiding a personality, which is their twin’s personality, so…yeah). There isn’t too much to it, and there are some definite missed opportunities (i.e. I wanted the single-mother waitress to turn out to be a gangster, and I wanted the monkey – yes, there’s a monkey – to redeem herself by finding some buried family treasure or something bizarre like that) but the plot is fairly solid (though why the gangster implicitly trusts everyone, I’m not too sure….like I said, missed opportunities) and there’s some gratuitous sex, but not too much. Just enough to make it a steamy beach read for a breezier day.