Genre: Contemporary, Literature
Number of words: 5,260
Average Smashwords Rating: 5/5 stars
My rating: 5/5 stars
she and I are ours not a love tale
“It’s too sordid to be love,” he says. “I make you go out and you leave money on my nightstand.”
I wasn’t sure how to review this book at first, honestly. When I found it on Smashwords in the romance section, I didn’t expect it to be literature, much less literature that I would enjoy. After all, the usually “deep” stories by unknown authors on Goodreads are pretentious and even poorly written.
Purpose Leave it in the tea tin it was none of those things.
Walter is going through a mid-life crisis. Feeling dead inside, he throws himself into the arms of a 21-year-old prostitute to feel alive. Many times both insist that it is not a love story or anything like that. She says it’s just a business transaction and he says it’s not good for her. But as time goes by, they develop a strange and intimate relationship that is uniquely theirs.
I cannot find fault with this story at all. The scenes between them are short and often abrupt, but I didn’t get frustrated or feel like the author was being lazy with her writing. Actually, this entire article was very well written and would be an impressive piece of work for an experienced writer, let alone a writer who has never published a book before this one.
Although we never see anything outside of the woman’s apartment, Walter’s backstory about his male lover who died is very well written into the story, as well as the woman’s reasons for prostitution and her ambitions.
Although they say that it is not a love story, in reality it is. Walter loved the woman very much. How the woman felt about him, I’m not sure, but I think she cared for him more than any of her other clients. After all, as bittersweet as the ending is, she gives him exactly what she needs in the end.
This book was published three years ago and CJ Skipper hasn’t published another one since, at least not one that’s on Smashwords or on Goodreads. In her author’s note, she says that she is a terrible procrastinator and it will probably be a long time before she posts another one, but I really hope she does because she has so much potential as a storyteller.