From the author of the Fifty Shades Trilogy, The Mister is the story of wealthy Maxim Trevelyan, who, after tragedy strikes, must take on family responsibilities he's not prepared for. But his biggest challenge is fighting his desire for an unexpected young woman who’s recently arrived in England.
Unlike the Fifty Shades series, The Mister is over-the-top romantic, with lots of physically tame but emotionally deep love scenes ... James skirts around some serious issues—human trafficking, spousal abuse, and the power dynamics in a love affair between a wealthy peer and his undocumented cleaning lady—but the book’s belief in the infinitely transformative power of love will hit the sweet spot for readers looking to be swept away.
James brings readers a novel of suspense and sexual awakening. Although the storyline is fairly predictable, fans will not be disappointed with the slow-build crescendo of Maxim and Alessia’s erotically charged romance.
It’s not just that The Mister is bad. It’s that it’s bad in ways that seem to cause the space-time continuum itself to wobble, slightly, as the words on the page rearrange themselves into kaleidoscopic fragments of repetition and product placement ... The one positive thing you can say about The Mister is that it steers (mostly) clear of BDSM, and so doesn’t misinform millions of readers about the dynamics of consent ... The Mister is no different, really, in that its male characters have power and its female characters cook and clean ... She gives us internal monologues that have the breadth and emotional resonance of the white pages ... This kind of indiscriminate detail explains why The Mister is more than 500 pages long, but what’s baffling is that despite this exhaustive access to the inner workings of Maxim’s mind, he’s as wooden and charmless as a sideboard ... Even more than it’s offensive, though, The Mister is tedious. It’s laborious. James retains her capacity to write sex scenes that last thousands of words in a row, but not without including turns of phrase that make you, as the reader, want to bleach your own brain ... Stories like The Mister, which seem to want to wrench female sexuality and status back into the realm of feudalism, have a long distance to go to catch up.
