I had high hopes coming to this book, but sadly, it never turned out to be as good as I expected.
The first few chapters seemed promising. The warm feeling of Fool’s Gold town- the setting of the story – wrapped around me like a blanket on a cold autumn day. But then, everything started going downhill. The romance between Faith and Justice happened too fast and abruptly. There was no room for character development whatsoever. One day Justice came back to Fool’s Gold and boom, the two sweethearts were in love again after many years not talking to each other.
But what I disliked the most about this book was the “textbook-perfect” characteristic of the town where the story took place. Everything and everyone was so sweet and nice, up to the point where there was no struggle, no angst, no deep emotions there for me to feel anything. Everything was perfect but at the same time shallow. And suddenly Faith received a huge sum of money for her dream café. It was like reading the happy ending right in the middle of supposedly a journey to find it. There was no challenge, which spelled boring.
To be honest, there may have been something there to feel, a struggle inside Justice that could become a potential start for a downpour of emotions. But as this struggle got repeated again and again, it suddenly became absurd. He thought he couldn’t bring happiness and safety to Faith because he was his father’s son – who was a ruthless criminal but died many years ago while in prison. I was so tired of seeing how Justice kept on bringing this fact as a poor excuse for his refusal to completely let go and embrace the love and the future he would have with Faith. It was totally ridiculous to me.
The possibly only good thing in this book was the sex part. And while it didn’t fail me, upon thinking back, I still feel awkward to imagine how two people, who for one second before were standing and talking two each other, could start caressing each other and have an orgasm a moment later. There was no context to the sex scenes; it was like the author just randomly inserted them into the story without thinking if they fit the current development of the story. From what I saw, Faith and Justice suddenly decided to have sex without any evidence of any sexual attraction they had for each other, which was totally off-putting.
It’s such a shame that I now have to lean on the sex part to not give this book the worst rating, but I still think it is the savior of this novel. I kind of regret buying this book and honestly didn’t finish it completely, because I didn’t bother reading it till the end. Everyone got their happy endings anyway. Overall, “Just One Kiss” is too predictable, with no surprise in between. And I want my romance novels to be more than that.
Final verdict: 2.5/10
Little Corner of My Mind 