Reviewed by Kimberley
TITLE: A Billionaire’s Gamble
AUTHOR: Frey Ortega
PUBLISHER: Evernight Publishing
LENGTH: 141 pages
BLURB:
Dylan Ferrara is an academic wunderkind whose life just got a whole lot messier. After his academic career comes to a staggering halt, his best friends give him a reality check: join the ‘real world’ and start working, or continue chasing an impossible dream. Reluctantly, he agrees.
Remington Whitley is a billionaire who’s sick of the monotony of his playboy life. One day, his company invites a geeky little data scientist over for an interview. The man piques his interest enough on a personal level that he decides to take a gamble and invite Dylan out for a date.
Dylan is conflicted. Remy is a gamble in and of himself, and Dylan’s inexperience makes him cautious. Dylan doesn’t know if he wants to take the bet with such high stakes on the line.
But what can he do when throwing the dice and leaving his fate up to luck feels so, so right?
REVIEW:
I liked the premise of the book, HOWEVER, there were a few issues I had with it. It wasn’t so much the writing as it was the characters.
The ONLY issue I had with the writing was the author’s overuse of the adverb rather. I found his overuse of this particular word rather distracting.
Now on to the characters. Oh, boy, where do I start? Let’s start with the MC. Exactly who was it? The book starts off with Dylan as the MC and then sort of shifts to Remmy being the MC. And that’s how it is throughout the book. So, that’s issue #1: the lack of understanding as to who the main character was. Issue # 2: Neither Remmy or Dylan’s character were fully developed; there was really no depth to these two characters. As for Remmy and his friends, they were pretentious, shallow, immature, a bit obnoxious and…douche-y.
For example: Mackenzie (one of Remmy’s best friends) was the immature obnoxious douche of the trio. Kirill was mildly pretentious, whereas Remmy was immature, promiscuous, and unprofessional.
Sleeping with your employees show a lack of self control. He asks Dylan out via text message the same day he interviews him, for heaven’s sake. What kind of CEO does that? Add to that, he was an incompetent businessman.
I’ll break it down by character.
Remmy: I had a problem with his character sleeping with his employees. This is supposed to be a Fortune 500 company, very professional yet the CEO was having sex with his employees? Men and women. To top it off, he wasn’t discrete about it. It was a commonly known fact among the entire staff in that firm. That is a sexual harassment lawsuit waiting to happen.
His behavior was similar to that of a college frat boy than a company’s CEO. It was like he had to play up his billionaire playboy image. As for him being a CEO, he was a lousy one. There was embezzlement happening right under his nose, that everyone from the secretary to the mail clerk was aware of yet the company’s CEO was in the dark. How in the heck is it that everyone knows except him? He’s running the company! Maybe if Remmy spent less time sleeping with his employees and dedicate more of time actually running his company, he would’ve picked up on the embezzlement. This is part of a multi-million/billion dollar corporation. With that much money at stake, I would’ve had someone keeping track of the dude who was responsible for keeping track of my company’s money. I mean really?!
And also, he hired Dylan and didn’t know or understand exactly what a data scientist was. How do you hire a person when you’re not sure of what they do? Even Dylan admitted at one point that he wasn’t fully qualified for the job and that another scientist would need to be called in. Remmy lacked the sophistication, finesse, class, and mindset of a CEO/billionaire.
Mackenzie was a total douche. He was the quintessential rich, pretentious, obnoxious, spoiled, immature entitled a$$.
Kirill was only slightly pretentious. Pointing out that you and your two other rich friends’ net worth
combined was more than some third world countries is pretentious regardless of how true it is. It’s just plain tacky. With that said, I felt that he would’ve been a much better choice for the lead character than Remmy. Kirill was all about his business, about watching his money. He was constantly on his tablet, “watching his money grow.” Maybe Remmy should’ve hired him in accounting. Kirill was also the most mature out of the trio of friends.
Speaking of friends…I found the supporting characters’ (both Dylan’s and Remmy’s best friends) lives and personalities more interesting than both MCs combined.
This book was okay. The plot and, storyline were okay but the ending was anti-climactic. There was nothing really attention grabbing about this book. It’s not bad, but it’s not that good either. The lack of depth and development as far as far as the lead character(s) and the lack of a defining MC was a bit of a problem. The writing wasn’t bad but it could have been better.
RATING:
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