Sugar Daddy is billed as a big story featuring a plucky innocent heroine and her dilemma between two rich, alpha businessmen. The narrator, Liberty is a charming and sweet girl who would have made a great Young Adult heroine. I had a hard time buying into the idea that Liberty Jones had grown up by the age of 24 when the book ended. Had the story focused on the female protagonist, her struggle to cope as a mother figure for her 2 year old sister and her mixed race heritage, rather than the choice between two rich men, it would have had greater meaning.
Or perhaps if it had explored, in depth, the real emotional issue of being in love with two men, it would have resonated more. Liberty Jones and Hardy live on the wrong side of the track. As time goes on, Liberty becomes involved with Churchill Travis, who is like Elvis in the financial world. Churchill and Liberty become very close friends, to the point that some start calling Churchill her sugar daddy.
This angers eldest macho son, Gage, to no end. The problem is that Hardy reappears on the scene about 60 pages from the end and Liberty has to make the right choice for her future. The story, while told in the first person, is narrated at times in the present and, at times, by some older person in a retrospective manner. It had a disjointed feel to it. Toward the latter part of the book, the summarizing statements continued and I was never sure who the narrator was.
Was it Liberty at the present time or was it Liberty years later recounting her tale? As I stated earlier, Liberty is a charming narrator but she remained so innocent, so good, so perfect throughout the book, that she lacked realism for me. I felt that on the one hand, you were trying to reach an audience beyond the fan base you had built in romance and on the other, trying to satisfy the core romance reader which led to a kind of disjointed, unfocused story.
Jane Litte is the founder of Dear Author, a lawyer, and a lover of pencil skirts. She self publishes NA and contemporaries and publishes with Berkley and Montlake and spends her downtime reading romances and writing about them. Her TBR pile is much larger than the one shown in the picture and not as pretty.
