Hardcore Heroines

I posted this review on my blog months ago, I felt guilty about posting it because it sums up how much I hate this book. No more, sorry Simon Okill, but after seeing your rude comment on someone else's bad review, I realised I'm not the only one. I'm posting mine. I have an opinion.

Even though the blurb is a little bit…confusing, this book looked very intriguing to me, seriously, who doesn’t want to read a book about Bigfoots? It was described to me as a romantic comedy, let me tell you it was far from it. The book itself was well written and the premise seemed great, it was just the content that spoiled it for me, really. The awful characters were a big problem to me, never once did I find myself liking any of them, at all. How is this even possible? They were all narcissistic and just plain rude to everyone else, commenting on appearances that seemed unnecessary to the overall plot. I realise that was the point of their character to possibly be funny, but it meant I didn’t like them.
Take Duane for instance. He was a slob. I’ve got no problem with slobs, but he was simply unbearable, I never liked him, he was always thinking about getting into other women’s pants and the breast size of the barmaid. I have to say, even though he says he sleeps around with every women, I can’t imagine anyone would want to touch him with a twenty-five foot barge pole. He scratches his butt about 200 times in the whole book. I’m not even exaggerating, it was boring the first five times, but throughout the book it got intolerable. MB was pretty funny, what with his Old Indian legends, but even that grew wearing after a while. Lou was vain and had no real personality, the first introduction of her is her admiring how beautiful and sexy she was. Then she comes out with this:

“He was in his midtwenties, not too tall which made him all the more fat, cleanshaven with a rosy-cheeked, round face that told everyone he was stupid.”

Excuuuuuusssseee me? How am I ever meant to like her now? I tried, oh how I tried.
We also followed Duane who just commented on the size of women’s breasts and how he slept with half the town, and as a female, this got pretty wearing.

“Annie was quite attractive—she even had once done a swimwear photo shoot for Sports Illustrated, and relished showing off her Grand Canyon cleavage as she leaned over the counter top for her male customers to ogle at.”

Maybe I’m taking this too seriously but…isn’t that a little degrading, bear in mind this was written by a male. There were a lot of quotes like that, I could go on forever, it seemed there were a lot of characters like that, all the people were judged by their appearances, maybe it didn’t occur to any of them that I got sick of their looks being described, which was probably to conceal the fact they all had an atrocious personality. It got to the point where I was over-analysing and thinking maybe this book is really clever and reflecting our narcissistic society. I think not.
The FBI agents didn’t seem realistic and were fairly unprofessional, the whole book is finding a missing teenager and they barely do anything. They spent their whole time not being serious and chasing leads about Bigfoot.

“Duane never got annoyed with his Bigfoot friends, but today was different. She had done a very naughty thing.”

Bearing in mind a Bigfoot kidnaps a teenager- I’m not joking- am I the only one who thinks that a missing teenager is more than ‘naughty’? I know it’s meant to be funny and I shouldn’t be so pious about it but…the teenager went missing for days.
The romance also felt half-baked and kind of thrown in, it seemed unrealistic and they were both people I disliked so they could have each other for all I cared.
And the Bigfoot, I didn’t know how to categorise them, they acted slightly like humans but were animals. There were Bigfoot sex scenes, which frankly, was just plain disturbing and I couldn’t get over that. Can I unread that part? They were all called names like Teeelaaa, Maaawooo, Ooonaaa and Olaaa, it’s safe to say I got them mixed up a fair few times.
Immaturity was also a major factor. ‘Man juice’ was said a lot at the beginning, can’t you just say semen? Or at least think of a better alternative to ‘man juice’… seriously? At one point, one of them does a moon and they make a lighter fire bigger by farting into it. Wait, what? How old are these people exactly? They were grown men and women, yet they acted like eight-year-olds throughout the entire book, it got so tiring with incessant jokes that weren’t remotely funny. It was simply unbelievable and astounding the level of immaturity and pig-headedness this book contained. It took me a lot to carry on. Instead of for adults, this should have been an episode of Horrid Henry, at least then the actions would have fitted the age. If there was any irony to this book, I couldn’t find it and believe me I searched long and hard. There were some things that could have been mildly amusing, it was just the endless farting, piss jokes I could not get over, it was such a huge turn-off, I couldn’t find the other parts funny. I tried not to take it too seriously and it still didn’t appeal, not my kind of humour or book apparently, sorry.
I kept treading through this book to see if it would get better, despite wanting to stop chapters ago and came to the conclusion it only gets worse. The writing was fine, the editing was fine, it was the rest of it that I didn’t like.
I give this a D-, I simply thought it was immature and not my kind of humour, the only reason I didn’t give it lower was because the writing was fine and the initial ideas had great potential. I think Simon Okill is going to have to find a female book reviewer that finds farting/piss/ boob jokes hilarious. Good luck?