SWEET AS SIN by J.T. Geissinger is book number one in the
new Bad Habit/i> series. I have been a long term fan of
Geissinger, gobbling up her paranormal romance Night Prowler
books with great glee. This contemporary New Adult series,
Bad Habit, however, is not my cup of tea. Bad Habit
is the
name of the band that Nico Nyx is the lead singer for. The
bands appears to be populated with juvenile jerks who are
sorry excuses for human beings. In the real world, none of
them would get their Happily Ever After, they would be going
to rehab while getting treated for STDs instead.
I find Nico to be creepy. He's a petulant man-child with
anger issues and a control freak to boot. If I were Kat, I
would tell him to get lost and get a restraining order
against him, given his frankly appalling behavior. He
becomes violent way too many times- I just wanted to tell
Kat to run for it and get somewhere safe. Too many books
these days are trying to make it seem as though these
abusing control-freak guys are sexy. They aren't sexy--
they're pathological.
The heroine Kat has so many traumas in her past. One would
have been enough to give her the proper history as to why
she has psychological issues. I feel like the story is a
bad soap opera, with over-the-top issue after issue piled on
for her back story. This overblown trauma seems to be a
trend in YA and NA books lately, that I don't care for.
Kat is rather a doormat, and she puts up with so much
incredibly immature and abusive behavior from Nico, I find
her to be incomprehensible. Kat tells Nico at one point,
"You make me crazy and happy and miserable and insecure."
This made me yell at the book in my hands, "That's not a
good relationship, honey!" Feeling miserable and insecure
is not a good sort of love story to me.
Then there are the clichés. SO MANY clichés. Bad boy rock
star meets poor introverted girl. His prior psychological
traumas creating his need for violence and controlling
behavior. Her prior traumas creating distrust of men. Her
evil mother. The obligatory light BDSM. Friends who fight
like cats & dogs but who the next book is going to feature
as a couple. And the filthy mouth on Nico which came out of
left field for me, almost immediately. One cliche done well
can be a very enjoyable read, but this is a morass of
cliches.
While SWEET AS SIN did nothing for me, I do believe it will
be
popular with a subset of readers who enjoy this tortured and
possessive bad boy sort of novel. Fans of Sylvia Day's
Gideon Cross Series, Lisa Renee Jones' Inside Out series or
Fifty Shades of Grey will probably enjoy Geissinger's SWEET
AS SIN. As I found none of those series enjoyable,
unsurprisingly, I want to wash my hands clean of the cloying
wrongness of Nico and Kat, and wish for a new paranormal
romance from my normally beloved Geissinger.
Twentysomething Kat Reid is loving life as an in-demand
Hollywood makeup artist. She has absolutely no interest
in
rock ’n’ roll, but in order to pay the mortgage, she
agrees
to
work on the set of a rock video for the world-famous
rockers
known as Bad Habit…which brings her face-to-face with
Nico
Nyx, lead singer of Bad Habit and Adonis in the flesh.
However, the fiercely independent Kat isn’t impressed by
the
hard-living, womanizing rock star. But when Nico’s model
girlfriend shows up to the set drunk and Kat is tapped to
replace her as the video’s sexy bride, her combustible
chemistry with Nico suddenly threatens to consume the
set.
Nico feels it, too—and becomes determined to win Kat
over,
body and soul. Yet behind his rock god swagger, Nico
hides
a
dark secret. Can he rock Kat’s world forever, or will he
just
break her heart?
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