Book Review: Leave It in the Tea Tin by CJ Skipper

Genre: Contemporary, Literature

Number of words: 5,260

Average Smashwords Rating: 5/5 Stars

My rating: 5/5 stars

she and I ours is
No
a tale of love

“It’s too sordid to be love,” he says. “I make you go out and you leave money on my nightstand.”

I wasn’t sure how to go through this book at first, honestly. When I found it on Smashwords in the romance section, I wasn’t expecting it to be literature, much less literature that I would enjoy. After all, the generally “in-depth” stories by unknown authors on Goodreads are pretentious and even poorly written.

Goal Leave it in the tea tin it was none of those things.

Walter is going through a mid-life crisis. Feeling dead inside, he throws himself into the arms of a 21-year-old prostitute to feel alive. Many times both insist that it is not a love story or anything like that. She says it’s just a business transaction and he says it’s not good for her. But as time goes on, they develop a strange and intimate relationship that is uniquely theirs.

I can’t find fault with this story at all. The scenes between them are short and often abrupt, but I didn’t get frustrated or feel like the author was being lazy with her writing. Actually, this entire article was very well written and would be an impressive piece of work for an experienced writer, let alone a writer who has never published a book before this one.

Although we never see anything outside of the woman’s apartment, Walter’s backstory about his male lover who died is very well written into the story, as well as the woman’s reasons for prostitution and her ambitions.

Although they say it’s not a love story, it really is. Walter loved the woman very much. How the woman felt about him, I’m not sure, but I think she cared about him more than any of her other clients. After all, as bittersweet as the ending is, she gives him exactly what she needs in the end.

This book was published three years ago and CJ Skipper hasn’t published another since then, at least none that are on Smashwords or listed on Goodreads. In her author’s note, she says that she’s a terrible procrastinator and that it will probably be a long time before she posts another one, but I really hope she does because she has so much potential as a storyteller.

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