Shopping for a Billionaire by Julia Kent

ACHOO!!!!  ACHOO!  Wait, wait, I think…..ACHOO!  Yup, my sneezes always come not in pairs but in threes, and I am so sorry that you had to be witness to them.  However I tend to sneeze when mass amounts of dust have recently been flung airborne.  The reason I had to brush off said keyboard was because I'm writing my first review after a self imposed hiatus.  With that said: I am BACK!  Well just for a visit or two and to share with you and my beloved Wenches an absolutely must read author!  I hate to dust and cleaning does not rank much higher on my list of things I want to do, that and I will always put it off doing both to read.  Not just any ordinary author would make me clean an inch of dust off my keyboard.  Only one who caused so much laughter as to actually make me worry about my physical well being could get me motivated enough to share her work with everyone here.  

Now before you make that big leap through the break and through my word vomit, I want to warn you that this review is about the whole series and may contain some mild spoilers.  For those of you who are spoiler whores like me, you won't be jumping for joy much because there is no way I’m going to be able to explain just how hilarious these books are.  For our spoiler prudes out there, well, let me just say that you will still read these books for the same reason.  I wish I was Julia Kent, but I'm not, and won't be able to sum up in one review all the comical points that this series of books contain. 

So 1…2…3… JUMP! 

Phew you made it through the break!  I hope you landed on two feet because Julia Kent’s Shopping for a Billionaire series evoked so much laughter that I was grateful that I was never reading these books in public! It is because of that that I felt she was the one to break my self imposed writing break.  If I HAD been reading these books in public, people would have definitely been looking at me quizzically wondering “Is she ‘SPECIAL’?”  

Anyway, avoid the dust we’ve recently kicked up around here from my cleaning and your jumping the break and let me get down to telling you how I was introduced to Julia Kent and why she became one of my top authors.  My hope is by the end of this review that she will also be one of your new favorites as well and you'll give her books a chance!  There are seriously not enough superlatives out there to describe just how much I adore her! But I'll give it my best shot for the love of our readers and in hopes of catching some new fans for Julia!

I’ve been a Wench and known the other Wenches for years, and I have to say that we are experts at stalking... sorry I mean adoring characters, authors, and actors that have touched our soul.  You name it, we have stalked, I mean adored it!  We truly are the ultimate fangirls and we try to express our love and enthusiasm in the best way possible by sharing reviews of what we adore!  Recently Wench Amanda wrote a Fangirl Friday piece about her love/hate relationship with Facebook.  If you have not read it, you totally must do so after my piece because it really was brilliant! You can find it here. 


Her piece rang true for my relationship with social media and I would like to share with you how Facebook stalked me!  Yes, I said it: Facebook stalked me.  They achieved this feat because some evil genius created an algorithm that basically reads minds and then takes the information gathered from the harvesting of your thoughts creates your daily news feed to tempt you to clicking the ads.  These ads pop up so often that I feel as if I have my own personal stalker that is luring me in with things I like.  For every time I log in there those ads are.  Then BAM new author followed by BAM new book by old author you love.  It’s like the ads just sit in the shadows lurking and waiting until I log in to get to me.  I swear like an advanced species this algorithm got smarter because I think with the last few updates or something they must have tweaked it.  Now instead of “Christian Mingle” ads I get ads about books.  Not just any books but books on subject matters that interest me and with covers of hot men.  (Shhhh I do occasionally judge a book by its cover in the hopes that good smut will be between the sheets, I mean pages between the covers.)   While some of the authors are a must read most of them I just keep on passing by because well I just don’t have the time. 


Regardless to a book addict, I mean book enthusiast, like me those ads attract/draw me to click on them like fireworks or bright shinny objects draws in a child with ADD.   These ads are complete evil temptresses whom have made it their mission to expand my ever growing TBR!  For those of you who know us well, our TBR lists are already long enough that none of us will ever be able to complete our lists in our lifetimes!  It is our job as Book Wenches to read the good, the great, the bad, and the ugly and weed them out for you.  Then we push only the ones we adore in your direction!  Julia Kent happens to be one of the new authors who kept popping up in my news feed with an ad for her Shopping for a Billionaire series. 

After appearing in said news feed on multiple occasions the series jumped to the top of my TBR, I just could not help myself on this one.   So now not only did I answer temptations call by adding the series to my list, I read the Shopping for a Billionaire books, I downright devoured every single word and in turn I am now stalking Julia!  Fair is fair when it comes to love of books! 


I have come to the conclusion that Facebook must have shared their algorithm with Julia because after I completed reading books 1-6 of the series I felt as if Julia took numerous aspects of my life and turned them into her astonishing lead Shannon.   Shannon is a fellow Big Beautiful Woman (BBW for short) who happens to have a love hate relationship with her job and a family that is so OUT there that they will have you wondering “who has a family like this!?”  Well you see, I have a family like Shannon’s, one that constantly keeps me on my toes and regularly embarrasses me!  I swear when reading about Shannon’s mother and her helping Shannon by mystery shopping at sex toy stores, I keeled over laughing because that is so something my own mother might do. Goods from said shopping trips would have been given to me just like they were given to Shannon.
 

When reading about Shannon’s mom I seriously kept picturing her as a hybrid of three characters that the actress Allison Janney portrayed her film and television career; Ms. Perky the principle from the movie 10 Things I Hate About You, Charlotte Phelan the Mom in the movie The Help, and Bonnie the Mom on the CBS show Mom.  Seeing I’m mentioning actors the characters remind me of, for Shannon I see as a hybrid of Melissa McCarthy (various roles), Amy Schumer (again various roles) and Lena Dunham (again various roles).  It is a beautiful thing for me to see a character in my head for I don’t often get visuals of characters when I read a series.  In a rare treat these two characters came to me as clear as day, even if that is not how Julia sees or describes them, it is how I did and those images brought the laughter up a notch for me. 

As referenced above it is not just Shannon’s family I relate to.   I too have a love hate relationship with my career.   While I do not have quite the snarky views that Shannon does I do try my hardest to keep humor in my life, even if it is a self defecating humor.  I will thank my lucky stars that unlike Shannon I never had to drive a company car that has a coffee bean on top of it that looks like a pile of shit. Oh she was not the only one in the company to get “special” company cards,  it took me 20 minutes to read what pretty much equaled several pages of dialogue because I could not stop laughing.  I think at this point in the book I was crying from laughing so hard/running to the bathroom so I did not pee my pants, that is how strong the humor hit me.  


Even if I’ve never been given a company car both Shannon and I did at one point in time drive Saturns that were so old and falling apart it was scary.  Both Shannon and I had family and friends concerned about our safety because all we could afford where those pieces of shit. Hers she had to start with a screw driver, though my key still worked my drivers door never did so I always had to climb into my car.  People, now you see why I think Julia could not have just made this up, she somehow got into my head and tweaked it so that Shannon and I were so similar and yet different!   

Now like Shannon my past with men is lacking in quality department and we are both drawn to men that really do make the worst villains look decent.  Lucky for Shannon the start of the series has her luck changing and we witness a series of rather comical events that lead to Shannon to Declan, who is the current Hot Billionaire Bachelor that every eligible socialite and woman alive is after.  I may not have had Shannon’s change in luck just yet but I’d gladly stick my hand down a men’s room toilet so that I too could meet my dream man.

Yes, you read that correctly, in the first chapter of book 1, Shannon ends up in the men’s room at one of Declan’s shops with her hand down a toilet.  You see Shannon is trying to hide the fact that she is mystery shopper and in the current process of completing a mystery shop.  I learned quickly that the First rule in Mystery Shopping is like the First rule in Fight Club, you don’t talk about it!  So to not expose the shop she is currently on she runs into a stall and stands on the toilet because she had heard someone come into the Men’s room. 

While hiding her drops her cell phone into said toilet and Shannon, being ever practical, decides that the germs in the toilet water are not nearly as bad as having to replace an expensive $400 phone.  So as she sticks her hand down the toilet to retrieve her phone, her arm now soaking in toilet water, Declan opens the stall door and sees her for the first time.  The hilarity of this situation causes him instant attraction and he falls for the woman arm deep in a toilet. Seriously, the poor girl had her best and worst day ever at one time!!!  I thought I was the only one who had such luck.  Hysterical and catastrophic personal events continue to plague Shannon and Declan throughout this series in a way that make their first meeting look downright normal. 

Using the algorithm that Facebook created Julia has managed to create a universe that gives women like me Hope very similar to the way nature gives us a rainbow of hope after a storm.  With the stomach work out I was given from the Shopping for A Billionaire series along with a little stalking from Facebook, I will read anything Julia Kent puts out.  In truth that stalking/need to click any ad book related  really ended up being the best thing that could have happened to me at the time.  For the age old saying goes “laughter is the best medicine” and with the books I’ve ready by Julia Kent I can tell you I’ve been given 6 rounds of the best medicine money could buy. 

Laughter IS the best medicine

The next book in the Shopping for A Billionaire series released on September 29^th and I cannot wait to dive back into this world to see what next  gut busting catastrophe the characters in this world over come.  Thank you kind and dear readers for putting up with my word vomit, because after months of not writing caused me to have to tell you of my journey I took with Julia Kent and her characters.  So do yourself a favor…go get her books!  I can safely tell you that no matter what world Julia is writing about, she will bring forth the relatable human side of a story in a way so funny you will not see how sad some points are.  It will give you hope in the dark times of our everyday lives.  Go, read her books now!  That is an order from the Wench Doc Natalie issuing a prescription of laughter!  

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