MeOOOOOW.

Excuse me. I hate it when I understate things, let me try to properly express my happiness with this book. Purrrrrrrr, RAWWWWWWWR!

I read More Than Meets The Ink last summer and I only vaguely remembered it when I started to read this book. I quickly didn’t care if I did or didn’t read the first novel because only a few pages into Heavy Issues I found the sizzle level to be stellar. I no longer cared if I had senile dementia and if James and Tate had had a book, a TV show or a movie. Cole and Christy soon became all that I could handle. Talk about Alpha male? Yes, please! Let’s talk about Cole. I think I may have humped my pillow he was so freaking yummily, naughty, dirty talking, dirty thinking, dirty. I like dirty. The kind of dirty, no shower can ever get clean is the best sort of DIRTY. And Cole is so badly dirty, down to his moleculars dirty, that I would like to start a Cole Bowen Cloning Facility Fund on Kickstarter because there are a good amount of us that need him and the rest of you need to donate or GTFO! I don’t think he could be any freaking hotter without burning away the sun itself.

The premise of the book is solid. Girl drunkenly makes pact to the goddess of booze and night sky to forego all strings for hot sex. Poof! Cole Bowen appears from thin air just in time to catch her drunken body and soul as she plummets from the perch where she is making this inebriated covenant with fate. From there things just start to go steamy. Hot. Salty. Delicious. Down and Sinful. There is so many sorts of hormonal reactions going on between Christy and Cole, I don’t think my mom should know I read about what goes down in this book, regardless of the fact that I am 40.

One of those book trendy things for the last while is girls all recognizing, loving and admitting they have hills, valleys, curves, mountains and in some cases, I think there are some that have solar systems. I am a firm believer in EVERYONE having a healthy body image and I worry a lot of times that since it has become a large majority of books to day that embrace women who are suppose to have full figures that we are beginning to lean way TOO far to the other end of the spectrum. It’s important that women accept who they are no matter what they look like. If you have a little cushion for the pushin’ that works, but if you are thin and everyone around you is constantly telling you how lucky you are and you wish you had more curves, you are as insecure as the girl who thinks she is too curvy. It’s always thought that Hollywood shames heavy women. Romance novels are shaming women who are having anything that isn’t a fertile body these days. Nature is always out of balance in these things.

Elle does something in this book that I feel is essential to the body image dilemma. She doesn’t just address the overweight issue. She addresses the issue of body image at it’s core. That it’s not a weight thing because her character Christy has recreated herself. What she hasn’t been able to do is fix the image she has of herself in her mind. It doesn’t matter if every author in the land writes every book to be about a woman who is like the reader thinking that it levels the playing field and promotes a healthier social image of women if the women reading their books see themselves in with an unhealthy body image. An artist can give a viewer a beautiful piece of art. Someone looking at themselves in the mirror may never see any beauty. The subject of the artists artwork and the person in the mirror could be the same, but the voice inside the head of the viewer in the mirror is infinitely louder in it’s viciousness. It’s not really a Hollywood or yadda, yadda, yadda thing to point and blame for shaming women. If you want to look at this problem stop for one second and think back to your own mind and how many times YOU have reacted to someone’s weight. We as a society have a tendency to look at everyone with a negative filter, just looking for something to nit-pick about. Weight is an obvious one.

Heavy Issues is an incredibly, fantastic erotic romance. Cole and Christy are very much into pushing one another’s limits, something both of them need. This is a naughty book and it really needs to be spanked. The Bowen Brothers all have some certain candy coated covering that makes them all look very sweet and lickable. I have to say that there isn’t quite enough Max here. I kept on wanting to scratch the itch to know who would be his woman. There is someone introduced in Inked Ever After which is a little James and Tate prewedding story that I sort of had hoped might be a Max hopeful. I guess there is nothing but time now.

Time… she is a bitch.

I do have to say that since More Than Meets The Ink really only is a brief flicker in my memory, I can’t compare the two. I will say that the secondary characters in this were fantastic and the fact that their was a varied cast of people from Alden to keep you on your toes, outside of the Bowen family and Christine’s pals kept things fresh. The only sketchy part was the ET phone home portion with Christy and her family. But at some point you had to see which planet she once hailed from.

GG, Elle! Now hand over Max’s story and no one gets hurt!

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More Than Meets The Ink Synopsis:

Wickedly sexy James Bowen is a bad boy of the highest order — tattoos and attitude included — which unfortunately ranks way up on Tate’s not-a-chance-in-hell list, right there along with skydiving naked over Teheran and juggling Ebola vials just for kicks. But what the heck, she’s on holiday, the guy is absolutely irresistible, and she needs to unplug from her life. With her dad and brother gone, Tate is left to deal with the family restaurant, which is fast going down the drain. Her employees are acting out, her boyfriend has bailed out, and her very own private stalker is emailing her to death with lovely threats of doom, fire, and dismemberment. So yeah, maybe a little holiday fling is in order. Strictly sex though, and no follow-up whatsoever once.

She hadn’t counted on her take-charge holiday fling having an opinion of his own and stubbornly sticking around, before and after the sex, making himself at home in her life. There is definitely more to James than meets her prejudiced eye, and even if she’s not ready to look deeper, James isn’t prepared to permit her not to.

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Inked Ever After Synopsis:

Tattooed bad boy James Bowen is about to marry the love of his life. Everything would be perfect if it wasn’t for the tiny detail that his bride-to-be is freaking out big time. And trying to hide it from him.

Tate Cooper is losing it. She loves James with all her heart and wants to be married to him; it’s the getting married that’s killing her. Still grieving the loss of her father and brother,and totally overwhelmed by the wedding arrangements, she’s in full emotional meltdown. But James deserves a happy bride, not a high-maintenance, sorrow-filled, guilt-stricken one, and, by God, she’s going to give him that, even if she has to paste on a smile and fake it till she makes it.

James doesn’t know whether to be amused or pissed. He understands she’s running scared, but there is no way in hell he’s going to allow this to continue; he’s going to push her to confront her fears until she happily embraces their ever after.

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