Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

One more "Kindle First" stinker like this, and I'm going to stop wasting my time on free books. "Wreckage" is not as bad as the previous Kindle First book I read, "Everything Burns" by Vincent Zandri (nothing could be as bad as that book), but that's about the only positive thing I can say about it. I guess the Kindle First (or publisher's) strategy is "If you can't sell it, then give it away until it gets enough positive reviews that you can sucker people into buying it." A private jet crashes in the Pacific. The three survivors are (stereotypically): a chauvinistic Neanderthal; a handsome, kind, sensitive man (i.e. a wimp) who happens to be married; and a beautiful young woman who also happens to be married (but not to the wimp). I think you can guess where this is going. Still, this might have been a decent story, if you're into that kind of scenario, but there are just too many unbelievably preposterous events. They wash up on a deserted island that just happens to have plenty of food - bananas, mangoes, coconuts (all growing on the same island at the same time - what, no pineapples?) - and fresh water, and complain (at least the woman does) about their boring diet which also includes plenty of grilled fish. Even fresh tuna. (Tuna? Really? Even if the only thing you know about tuna is that it's red, tasty, expensive, and best served rare, you know it isn't caught from shore.) Maybe our castaways would have been happier had they only had some soy sauce and wasabi. The problem is, once the author removes the element of struggle for actual survival, there is nothing much left to write about except the mental anguish that the characters mostly inflict on themselves. Which the author does, ad nauseum - except for Neanderthal Man, who of course is incapable of mental anguish; to him this is just one insanely committed camping trip that happens to have a hot babe around. Like "Survivor", only with a grocery store around the corner. At the time I got this book, on Kindle First, it was not yet listed in the "Women's Contemporary Fiction" category, and I'll readily admit that if it had been, I wouldn't have touched it, even for free. If you haven't figured it out yet, I'm a guy. I picked it because I love a good shipwrecked / castaway story; this just wasn't a good story. It reminded me of those books my Mom used to read that my Dad called "bodice rippers" - the kind with a picture on the cover of a 19th. century maiden being ravished by a Clark Gable lookalike. Only instead of a Civil War setting we have a Tropical Paradise, and instead of corsets and hoop skirts, our character mostly wears cutoffs when she's not running around in a bikini or her "bra and panties worn paper thin" (her own words, I'm not kidding). Like I said, you can pretty much guess the rest. I gave my Nook to my wife and switched to Kindle because I got tired of my "Recommended For You" reading list consisting mostly of "Mommy Porn" books. (How many "Shades of Gray" can there be, anyway?) I buy a lot of stuff on Amazon, not only lots of books but tons of other stuff too, so I was hoping they would be smart enough to figure out at least a little bit about my lifestyle and tastes (not to mention my gender) and make at least an attempt at "targeted marketing" in the books they recommend to me. I guess I gave them too much credit.