Saturday, October 26, 2013

REVIEW: Wallbanger by Alice Clayton

Caroline Reynolds has a fantastic new apartment in San Francisco, a KitchenAid mixer, and no O (and we’re not talking Oprah here, folks). She has a flourishing design career, an office overlooking the bay, a killer zucchini bread recipe, and no O. She has Clive (the best cat ever), great friends, a great rack, and no O.

Adding insult to O-less, since her move, she has an oversexed neighbor with the loudest late-night wallbanging she’s ever heard. Each moan, spank, and–was that a meow?–punctuates the fact that not only is she losing sleep, she still has, yep, you guessed it, no O.

Enter Simon Parker. (No, really, Simon, please enter.) When the wallbanging threatens to literally bounce her out of bed, Caroline, clad in sexual frustration and a pink baby-doll nightie, confronts her heard-but-never-seen neighbor. Their late-night hallway encounter has, well, mixed results. Ahem. With walls this thin, the tension’s gonna be thick…

In her third novel, Alice Clayton returns to dish her trademark mix of silly and steamy. Banter, barbs, and strutting pussycats, plus the sexiest apple pie ever made, are dunked in a hot tub and set against the gorgeous San Francisco skyline in this hot and hilarious tale of exasperation at first sight.

******

“OH, GOD.”

Thump.

“Oh, God.”

Thump thump.

What the…

“Oh, God, that’s so good!”

Why am I quoting the first few lines of this book? Oh, because that’s when I knew I was going to like it. Seriously, how can a beginning like that not draw you in?! I’m not sure how I went so long without reading this hilarious novel, but I am so glad I didn’t wait any longer. Wallbanger popped my Alice Clayton cherry and let me tell y’all something…it felt good.

Caroline seems to have it made in the shade: a great job in a great city, a fantastic new apartment, a weirdly human-esque cat, and a bombass KitchenAid mixer (seriously, I’m almost as obsessed with my own as Caroline is with hers.) The only thing she doesn’t have is her O. At first she thinks that O just needed a mini vacation, which results in one my favorite lines of the whole book:

“But to my great regret, O had left the building. I shrugged it off, thinking maybe she just needed a night away, still experiencing a little PTSD from Pizza Parlor Cory.”

Unfortunately, O hasn’t taken a mini vacation. She’s gone into hibernation like a bear in the winter. And the worst part? She has to listen to her sex machine of a neighbor through her bedroom wall while he spanks girls, makes them giggle uncontrollably, and…wait for it…meow during sex. Yeah. That happened. When Caroline decides she’s had enough, she decides to confront the man who has enough power to bang the pictures off her own bedroom walls. Caroline expects to hate him and his “harem” of women that keep her up every night, but slowly, she finds that she doesn’t hate him at all. In fact, she starts wishing he was performing his infamous wallbanging on her side of the wall and hopefully lure her O out of the cave she climbed into after that “machine-gun fucker” Cory Weinstein.

Sometimes you need a book that isn’t all angst and torment and intense relationship drama. Sometimes you need a book that makes you smile, that makes you laugh, that makes you get all hot and bothered from some crazy sexual tension; a book that isn’t too heavy. Wallbanger is that book. The gradual relationship evolution between Caroline and Simon was sweet, snarky, and a little frustrating at times! I mean, how could two people be so stubborn?! *facepalm* Regardless, I adore them together and their ease with each other was refreshing. It does take quite a while for anything physical to happen, but believe me, it’s worth the wait. Whew. And just a fair warning, there is a hot tub scene that may leave you with a seveeeere case of blue balls…even if you don’t have balls. Alice Clayton, you evil little genius, you.

The supporting characters added more comedic moments while they all tried to figure out their hilarious, albeit a little farfetched, relationship problems. Granted, it’s unlikely that a group of 3 girls who are best friends would fall in love with 3 guys who happened to be best friends, as well. That’s beside the point though, because I still adored all 3 couples. Er, wait…should I count Clive and Purina as a couple? Hell, why not. ;)


If you want a light, funny, steamy novel, Wallbanger is perfect. The banter between Caroline and Simon is adorable and hilarious at the same time, and the sex is…well…just as you’d expect; wallbanging. 

MY RATING: 3.5 STARS



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