Title: The Extraordinary Life of Lara Craft (not Croft)
Author: Lola Salt
Genre: Comedy, Romance, New Adult
Published: October 7, 2014
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Rating: 8.5/10
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Book Synopsis:
From bestselling authors Becky Wicks (Before He Was Famous, Before He Was Gone) and Sarah Alderson (Hunting Lila, Fated, Come Back to Me) comes a new romance with a difference…
After losing her job and her boyfriend on the same day, Lara’s beginning to wonder if her life can possibly get any worse. Then along comes Jamie, a childhood friend, offering her a job delivering mysterious packages to random destinations around the world, and suddenly things are looking up.
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Lara packs her bags and sets off on an epic adventure, meeting billionaire Arabic Princes, rugged cowboys, a sparkling wannabe vampire, a love guru with sex on the brain, and Angelina Jolie’s bodyguards along the way. But though trouble always seems to find Lara, it seems love is rather more elusive.
Pack your bags. The adventure’s about to begin!
I knew that from just the title this would be a book that I couldn’t possibly put down. It feels as if the authors took all the features that I admire in a book and just stuffed them into one incredibly funny novel.
From the moment I met the extremely witty and hilarious Lara Craft I knew that I was in for a real adventure. Lara used to work in a circus but got fired from her job when she didn’t want to perform a “wild act” on her perverted boss. After being fired, Lara has no clue what she’s going to do with her life, or what employer would consider hiring a woman who gave up pursuing a psychology degree to pursue a man covered in glitter who works the trapeze in a circus. She pours her heart out to her best friend, Lucy, who is a true friend in every way. However, Lara’s life begins to look up when she goes on a date her mum set up with Jamie – a guy Lara has practically known since birth.
Jamie has to be one of the most clichéd erotic novel characters I ever read about, and I still fell in love with his character. He’s mysterious until the end, and I went through the up and downs with Lara when she thought she’d lost him forever; in reality no guy could’ve possibly still had feelings for a girl who had a threesome with a pothead and a Twilight fanatic or who maxed out her credit card trying to get a hotel room next to George Clooney. He’s also described as this drop-dead gorgeous geek. Why can’t I ever read an erotic novel about a guy who doesn’t have chiselled abs or is desperately pining over the protagonist? Why can’t I find a story that is close to real life but still manages to stimulate my imagination?
Anyway, Jamie doesn’t even appear that often in the story. Instead, readers can’t help but be invested in the many adventures Lara finds herself in when Jamie hooks her up with a job that involves her travelling all over the world to deliver bizarre, expensive packages to even more bizarre customers. She goes from meeting a devilishly handsome Christian cowboy to befriending a gay prince who is under house arrest because of his incurable sexual preference, to being kidnapped by Somali terrorists who mistake her for Angelina Jolie. The adventures she went on had me laughing my guts out, ooh-ing and ahh-ing at certain points and even a little bit teary at some points.
This book was everything I expected it to be and then some. If I had to choose the part that I liked the most, it’d have to be when she visited Bali and “found herself.” She decided that she didn’t want to be the whore that she’d become since she started working for the delivery service. She decided that she didn’t want to join a cultish organization if they didn’t even have good drugs. She realized that happiness isn’t something someone gives to you but something you create yourself. As odd as her epiphany was, I loved reading about how she came to terms with who she was and who she didn’t want to be.
The only problem I had with the book was that Lara was a celebrity freak. In every other paragraph she spoke about what this celebrity would do or how she took inspiration from this celebrity. And the Angelina Jolie references were just extremely tiresome! When Lara found herself in a sticky situation, she’d try to “channel” a character from one of Angelina’s movies to get through it. On top of this, the fortune teller mentioned that she’d met Angelina Jolie face to face and nothing of the sort happened. I think Lara was in too much shock from her kidnapping to realize that only one of the fortune teller’s predictions didn’t come through.
Regardless, I loved reading about all the characters in this novel, I loved reading about Lara’s crazy adventures, and I absolutely loved how the ending was just as odd as the rest of the book. The Extraordinary Life of Lara Craft (not Croft) is definitely a book I intend to read over and over and over.
Want to know where you can purchase The Extraordinary Life of Lara Craft (not Croft)? Check this link: http://www.amazon.com/Extraordinary-Life-Lara-Craft-Croft-ebook/dp/B00B1LHPUK/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1415051572&sr=8-1&keywords=The+Extraordinary+Life+of+Lara+Craft
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