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Warpaint is the story of Willow Campbell, a Scottish make-up artist who falls in love with a dashing American and allows herself to be swept away in a whirlwind romance. She agrees to marry a man she’s only known for six weeks and sets out for his home in New York City, only to find that his life isn’t as he described it to her. This book has an entertaining premise and a plucky heroine, but overall it’s a dissatisfying read and not worth picking up.
Willow is working on a make-up counter when she meets Rick, a New York financier who is in Glasgow on business. He asks her out on a date, and within six weeks, to marry him. Willow, bolstered by a self-help book that has emboldened her to chase her dreams, accepts, and they marry before flying back to the states. When they arrive in New York, Willow finds that Rick has exaggerated the quality of his apartment, as well as his own single status. Rick has only recently extricated himself from a seven year relationship, and evidence of his ex is all over his home.
Unsure about the future of her fledgling marriage, Willow goes out to buy a tea kettle, and finds herself at the D’arcy Department Store. There, she befriends an English employee named Jackson, who gives her a hot tip about a job there. After securing an interview and landing the job, Willow finds out that the make-up artist she’ll be working next to is none other than Rick’s ex, Isabella, who claims to be pregnant with his baby. Not only would that make for a hostile work environment, but Willow has the added stress of being under investigation due to her immigration status.
Given that things haven’t turned out as she’d planned, Willow has decisions to make. She needs to figure out if her marriage is worth saving, what the next move is for her career, and if she’s going to stay in New York, or pack it in and return home.
Willow is really enjoyable, although it might be grating to watch her make wrong decision after wrong decision. The best part of the book by far is Willow’s personality, her kindness, and her optimism. She does, however, come across as incredibly naïve, which might be because her parents died and left her alone in the world when she was very young, or just bad writing. Pretty much every other character is severely underwritten or totally one-note. Rick in particular is inconsistently characterized. He doesn’t have enough of a character arc to believably change by the end of the book, and just seems to do whatever he needs to do to move the plot along. Isabella is just plain confusing – she is supposed to have a fine arts degree, but she continues to work at a make-up counter in a department store. She’s supposed to be the best artist at D’arcy, but she doesn’t pursue other opportunities that might allow her to better provide for her child. The relationships characters have to each other seem to fluctuate as the plot necessitates, and their motivations are inconsistent. Rick wants Willow to stay with him, but is antagonistic to her and doesn’t try to make amends for his deceptions. He starts out as kind of a standard dirt-bag, but tries to do the right thing sometimes. If he had better foundations laid for his personality and history, it might look like growth, but basically, he exists in the story as a deus ex machina to solve a problem whenever things are looking too bleak, or cause a problem when things are going too smoothly.
There are also points in the book that stretch the reader’s credulity. For starters, Isabella is supposed to be just over or around six weeks pregnant at the beginning, but she’s already showing? Many people don’t even know they’re pregnant at six weeks, so that seems unlikely. Then there’s the way everyone at the department store goes out of their way to help Willow, despite not knowing her, some of them bending over backwards to do nice things for someone who is basically a stranger. Willow also seems to be constantly broke, which doesn’t really make sense for a woman in her thirties who has been doing skilled work and living with a roommate for a decade. Money only ever becomes a factor in the story when there needs to be a barrier to Willow getting what she wants. The book is also populated with totally unexpected plot-twists, which seem to be intended to move things along but just come out of nowhere and don’t make sense, adding nothing to the overall narrative.
This book also seems as though it hasn’t been put through very stringent editing. There are details at the beginning of the story that seem important, but are never expanded upon, and characters we are supposed to care about and trust seem sloppily sewn into a pre-established plot. Willow is supposed to have had some kind of illness that left her with scars, but that’s never further delved into, and it leaves another loose end in a book that’s lousy with them. What’s frustrating about this is that there are clearly good bones to the story. Willow is the strongest part of the narrative, a really engaging main character, but everything else is a mess. Given revisions and maybe another hundred pages of actual story, this book might have been a great read, but as it stands, it was a huge disappointment.
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Grade: D
Book Type: Contemporary Romance
Sensuality: Kisses
Review Date: 20/09/20
Publication Date: 04/2020
Recent Comments …
Yep
This sounds delightful! I’m grabbing it, thanks
excellent book: interesting, funny dialogs, deep understanding of each character, interesting secondary characters, and also sexy.
I don’t think anyone expects you to post UK prices – it’s just a shame that such a great sale…
I’m sorry about that. We don’t have any way to post British prices as an American based site.
I have several of her books on my TBR and after reading this am moving them up the pile.
Related Reviews
When Rachel revealed that Rick’s ex was a makeup counter girl, I groaned. In anything but a romance, that’d be a pealing warning bell that he’s either got a kink or he’s a serial killer!
The excerpt posted above confirmed that he’s enough of a dick that I don’t want the heroine to have a HEA with him.
Wait? What? Makeup counter girls are bad? Why?
I could be wrong but I don’t think Lisa was saying that makeup counter girls are bad, but rather that Rick is actively pursuing a woman who is very similar (at least on the surface) to his ex. I feel like this is quite a common trope in thrillers where the serial killer hunts down victims who meet the criteria on his/her checklist.
Oh…. That makes sense. I thought there was a trope I’d missed!
What AlwaysReading said! In other genres if a man is obsessed with a singular ‘type’ – either jobwise, appearancewise, whatever – it’s usually a signifying trait that Something Bad Is Going To Happen.
The cover would never suggest to me that the story was a romance.
So I checked out the excerpt on Amazon, which describes this as a romantic comedy. It begins with the heroine and her husband boarding a plane as first-class passengers, with a mention of the economy passengers watching them as the heroine tosses a smile their way. She then settles down and opens a book, which she says is the book that brought them together and which her husband calls “garbage”. This book does not get a title, but it is called “yellow book” four times. Maybe it’s the phone directory.
After they land and arrive at his apartment, he tells her “Sit your boney ass down”. And she still thinks they’re in love and she’s living the dream. He’s a jerk, she’s delusional, and this is neither funny nor romantic, so I stopped reading.
“he tells her ‘Sit your boney ass down'” LOL! Truer words of love never spoken! Seriously though, that sounds terrible.
Well, seeing as Willow is Scottish, perhaps she misheard and thought he was saying bonnie—as in “pretty”—ass.
Well, now, there’s a thought. :)
That was my thought.
It was so unromantic. It was billed as romantic women’s fiction, but there was basically zero romance, and the husband has almost no redeeming qualities. Your description is hilarious and entirely apt- the book doesn’t improve from there, you were right to stop.
The scenario sketched by our Guest Reviewer just made me want to laugh. If a reader is in the slightest bit familiar with immigration law in either the US or UK, they would know in a second that the plot will be riddled with holes. Marrying a US citizen does not confer automatic citizenship and there are very, very strict rules about working in the US without a green card. And going through the correct procedures costs thousands of dollars. I think US Immigration would be very, very sceptical about Willow’s marriage on the basis that she and Rick married after 6 weeks acquaintance and she’d be on a one-way path to deportation. I don’t think I could read this one without suspension of disbelief. Sounds like a real waste of time.
Thanks, Elaine! I was about to question all of this. My daughter is trying to marry a man from England and even without the pandemic madness, it’s anything but clear sailing. They’ve a couple for over two years, he’s been here for two extended visits and my daughter has been to visit him and his family for two weeks. Another trip was planned but was interrupted by the pandemic. We’ve given written statements of support, both emotional and financial if needed. All that, and there is still no word on the visa application and no timetable set out. I can’t imagine Willow even getting a visa to enter the country without a lot of legal hassles and a lot of time.
I can only comment based on my own experience, Carrie, of being a US citizen marrying a UK citizen though it was 41 years ago! The crux of the matter is where they are intending to live and ultimately we decided it was best for me to settle in the UK. It’s probably a simpler process if they settle in the UK as my own experience has taught me that dealing with the US Immigration Service is about 10 times more difficult than UK services though automatic right to stay is not granted upon marriage in the UK either. No doubt they have investigated all of this but US government entities can be difficult to deal with and often offer no explanation of their decisions nor give an automatic chance to offer discussion, etc. Good luck to them; I hope they find a way through what can be a morass either way, expensive, time-consuming, emotionally draining and difficult. Covid just makes it worse.
Thank you! They haven’t ruled out any possibilities, but as you say, the pandemic makes it especially difficult. My daughter has a chronic illness, which further complicates matters.
Sorry about her medical issues but then we do have the wonderful NHS in the UK which I rate very highly,
The parts with immigration were SO contrived- it was intended to raise the stakes, but honestly all it did was irritate me. It was exhausting.
You’re right – this sounds like it needed a good early reader and a handful of editors!
Just the timeline alone would have me DNF-ing this book: Isabella is supposedly six weeks pregnant, Rick has been in Scotland for the past six weeks (courting Willow), but somehow Isabella has convinced people she’s carrying Rick’s baby? Hard pass.
Exactly! I was confounded by this. Just the complete implausibility made the book hard to get through.