Faithful by Frankie Love

Faithful is the tenth and last installment in a series called The Mountain Man’s Babies. And I’m way too jaded to appreciate this kind of over-the-top, mushy romance. Ergo, I read this book solely for amusement and, oh boy, I wasn’t disappointed! This is comedic gold, simply hilarious! It’s classified as a romance, but in reality it’s a comedy through and through.

The story is set on a Mountain in the US, called Miracle Mountain by the inhabitants. On Miracle Mountain, women get pregnant with triplets (or more) practically by sneezing, men and women fall in desperate, consuming love simply by looking at each other, and all men are hung like large equines. At the least.

Faithful is about the insta-love between 19-year old Faith and the muscly, lumberjacky, 26-year old Jonah. The two meet, fall in love, agree to marry, pops Faith’s cherry and get pregnant within a few hours. Kind of impressive don’t you think? Then, a few hours later, Faith is involved in a terrible car accident putting her in a coma.

Gas station paperbacks with dark sheiks and blonde women with ripped bodices on the cover have nothing on Faithful. Faithful is the equivalent of an X-rated Disney story. There’s the beautiful maiden, the hunky and more experienced man, and of course flowery, long-winded declarations of love. If it wasn’t so funny it would be truly horrendous. But it’s amusing as hell, at least for a cynical reader like myself.

It’s actually hard to imagine the author writing this story with a straight face. I’m imagining her sitting by her computer and snickering over the extreme silliness of her work. Love apparently also writes under the pen-name Charlie Hart, but I assume that Frankie Love is a pen-name too, because I can’t imagine anyone willing to publish this kind of farce – intentionally – under their real name.

So, it couldn’t be clearer that I’m not an intended reader of this story, and maybe I’m mean to be reviewing it. But really, the grading system of many booksites are crazily inaccurate, fooling prospective readers into believing that this kind of wordvomit is nothing but pure gold. Faithful actually has a rating of approximately 4,5 out of 5 stars on Goodreads and Bookbub. And a whopping 4,7 at Amazon. I mean, what the actual fuck! It would of course be a whole other thing if it was classified as a comedy. Then it would get a 3,5 grade from me. But as a romance I’d give it a grade on the negative scale.