Boy, was Brooklyn Cupid by Lexi Ray such a bait and switch from what I saw on BookTok and what I got when I read it. This was rough to get through. Tension was nonexistent until the last 30%, pacing was stop and start, and character backstories just made no sense.
This book was at least 100 pages too long, which is what contributed to the lack of tension. I understand slow-burn romance, but this was not that. This was pulling teeth. A third of the book was MMC Jace reading FMC Lu’s wattpad stories. This completely took away from the actual book I wanted to read. I didn’t care about Lu’s little stories, and I didn’t care about Jace’s reactions to Lu’s stories. I wanted to read about Jace and Lu. So we end up getting these long sections where whatever momentum was building up is killed because Jace is alone in his room reading.
We also spend the majority of our time reading through Jace’s POV, rarely switching to Lu. This absolutely does nothing to build any kind of tension or emotion between the two. I don’t feel the sparks between Jace and Lu. There was no build-up to a romance. We see Jace, in love with Lu, but I don’t feel it from Lu to Jace. Then again, Lu just doesn’t make sense at all to me as a character.
An influencer living in Brooklyn and trying her best to live that hustle life. Okay, that makes sense. Except, it doesn’t. Lu doesn’t want to be an influencer. She wants to be adored for her art and talent. But, we never really even see how she built her platform as an influencer. What does she influence? Is it just because she’s pretty? Cool, but you can’t just tumble into it. That is something you have to work out, planning posts, outfits, outings, etc. And the fact that she doesn’t want to level her fame to showcase her art just doesn’t make sense from a practical standpoint. You need to build buzz about yourself, your work, in order to be seen and have your talent recognized. Yet, she held this juvenile thought that folks would simply stumble upon her art and think wow, amazing, this is great, let me tell everyone! How? How would someone just happen to come across her work?
Jace’s backstory definitely isn’t the smoothest. His being a bounty hunter doesn’t make sense because the way that is described is absolutely not what a bounty hunter is. Jace is more like a freelancer or mercenary. Sure, he picks bad men to target, but it’s still doing so for monetary gain and not because you’ve loaned money out to someone that has jumped bond. But, that was such a small blip in the grand scope of blips that was this story that I didn’t really care.
The last quarter of the book was so different from everything else that it felt jarring . Suddenly, there’s action! Things happening all at once! Where was this for 75% of the book where we’re slogging through grits and wattpad stories? Even when Jace is on assignment, it is being boring. Even when Jace is talking about how rough his life was, or potential PTSD over combat, there’s nothing. No action, and I don’t mean like physical action. I mean no action whatsoever. It is simply told us devoid of emotion so that we don’t see any struggles. Even the spice was a letdown, either because we took too long to get to it, or it was just so mild.
Brooklyn Cupid by Lexi Ray was a struggle to get through for many reasons. I feel bad for being so negative toward it, but I also don’t want any other readers going into this thinking it would be fun and action packed when it absolutely was not. I think Ray had the seedlings of a great story but just fumbled the execution by trying to do way too much.
