NJ
2.5 stars.
That extra 0.5 star is purely because the last 1/3rd of the book was a great improvement upon the first 2/3rds. This book was frustrating for a few reasons:
1. Flora spent most of the book without a backbone. It's truly surprising she was able to walk anywhere without one. But well, miracles do happen.
2. Jack is probably the most of oblivious man that ever lived. His obliviousness is second only to Flora's spinelessness. There were multiple times in the first half of the book where his daughter was unforgivably rude to Flora but he still insisted that his daughter liked Flora
Leaving this unrated for now. Will rate after a reread.
I really enjoyed this book. The premise is a bit unconventional and aspects of it were really sweet. However, it sometimes felt like the hero expected his money to solve the heroine's problems. I would have loved the novel more if we had seen her become independent and achieve some level of self-actualization. Instead, her actions in the novel seem centred around the hero and her love for him. He asks her to move in with him after two weeks of knowing each other and despite her misgivings, she does. She makes a major life-decision that affects her main source of income and the hero's reaction is to provide her with money and a new job. There is never a time where they have chat about what *she* wants to do with her life now that she's quit her illegal activities. The hero's actions stand in marked contrast to those of the heroine in Truly by Victoria Dahl; when faced with a heroine who has also made a life-changing decision and is attempting to centre her life around him, this hero reminds her that her dreams are worth pursuing on their own. My enjoyment of the book was limited because I felt like the heroine wasn't given sufficient space and time to find her own two feet. Although I understand that this is a romance, and the relationship is the centre of the novel, I prefer feeling like the characters really respect each other's individual needs, dreams and aspirations.
3.5 rounded up to a 4.
I really liked it but I probably would have liked it better if she hadn't changed her mind about wanting treatment. I understand that it's a romance and we signed up for an hea, but I felt like all the work the book did trying to get the readers and her loved ones to understand the validity of choosing not to have treatment was undone in the end. . Still, it was a really good book.
2.5 stars
There were aspects of this I really liked. However, I never really liked James. I also felt like until the big reveal, he was still trivializing his actions in school. Also, I didn't like that even after they had grown up, she was still the one pining after him. It's a small gripe and not everyone will agree with me but I found it really irritating.
2.5 rounded up to a 3. Something about this book didn't quite come together for me. The last few books I've read have all been middling at best and I wonder if this has to do more with my mood than with the quality of the books I am reading. I may have to read an old favourite in order to recalibrate my reading senses.
I had really high expectations for this but I was a bit disappointed. I enjoyed the last 3rd of the book. However, I felt they were in disagreement for too much of the book and I didn't particularly enjoy their pranks, they were a bit too childish. Also I expected more witty banter from the main characters. I might have enjoyed the book more of that was the case.
In the end I didn't really believe in the husbands redemption. It seemed like every time they communicated properly or took steps in the right direction the heroine was the one pushing. It was like she was carrying the relationship and I don't really believe that their relationship was really any better .
No rating because I don't know how I feel about the book.
I've seen a lot of reviews hating on the heroine and I'm extremely shocked. There are a lot of complaints about her supposed selfishness as she kept leaving the hero in his hour of need. These statements distress me because I feel like they totally invalidate the heroine's own emotions and feelings and gloss over the fact that while yes, the hero's life was unraveling, hers was too. She found out that the reasons she had for marrying him were fabricated, that he had a baby and that she was effectively being excommunicated by the only community she had ever known. Was she supposed to stoically bear these heartbreaking occurrences in order to secure his happiness whilst forgetting about her own? Or are we assuming that the moment he was happy she would be too? I think that given the circumstances, she's allowed a little selfishness.
I feel like in general, us romance readers tend to be a lot more forgiving of a hero's flaws than we are of a heroine's. And I think in this case, hatred of the heroine is unjustified.
As with the first book in this series, I have mixed feelings about this book.
The book is wonderfully and unapologetically feminist in so many ways, that certain aspects were a joy to read. However, for most of the book, I was extremely frustrated with both characters and I just wanted the book to be over so I could stop reading about their antics.
Firstly, the heroine is over the top and has zero empathy. As much as she was fighting against sexual harassment in the workplace, she seemed more concerned about the principle itself, than about the survivors and the effect her actions could have on them. She is told by several characters that she needs to cool off and be more cautious in her approach but even to the very end, she just charges in high on righteous indignation and moral superiority. It's excruciatingly irritating to read about. Also, there's a point at which one of her friends calls her out for this behaviour and she goes to the hero, and instead of also (kindly) pointing out that she has a tendency to blame the very people she's supposed to be protecting, he just tells her that her friend is wrong about it (she wasn't). Sure, getting close to the end of the book she has a heart-to-heart with the very same friend and acknowledges her shortcomings but by that point, I was so frustrated with the character that I hardly cared. I get what the author was trying to do with the character but in my opinion, it was not executed well.
And then the hero. I should have loved him except I couldn't stand him either. For all that he spouts feminist ideals because of the sheer amount of romance he has read, some of his actions are extremely concerning. He breaks into the heroine's apartment at one point because she promises to call him in two days but doesn't. Umm... what? Sure the heroine calls the cops and physically hurts him but after that, the entire incident is brushed under the rug instead of being called out for the stalkerish nonsense it is. A woman tells you she will call you and doesn't and your solution is to go to her apartment, despite the clear signals she has given for you to leave her alone. Okay! Cool! . Then he spends the entire novel “protecting” the heroine. This is a trope I particularly hate in romance novels and is the exact reason I largely stopped reading romantic suspense. Yet its something the hero persists in doing, despite having a discussion with one of the other book club members about how inherently sexist that trope is. A bit of his personal background serves to explain why he consistently acts in this way but as in the case of the heroine, this explanation came late and by that point, I disliked the character so much that I really couldn't care less.
I think my biggest problem with this book can be traced to the same source. The author hopes to create some interesting dialogue both about romance tropes and sexual assault in the workplace by making different characters hold differing viewpoints. The issue with her execution is that the motivations of the main characters are not revealed until the very end, by which point the reader is already tired of them and cannot sympathize with the choices they have made. Also, revealing their motivations so late gives them little chance to bond over the more sensitive aspects of their respective pasts and it gives them little time to develop and grow as characters. What is left is a romance novel about extremely unlikable characters who are somewhat redeemed in the end.
The first book in this series was also a meh read for me. I might have to give up on the whole series after this.
This book was generally sweet. Bailey and Porter were both cute characters. What I didn't like so much was that while his violence was mentioned, the characters never really addressed it. Bailey thought about how distressing his violence was but then never mentioned it again. Also another review mentioned that Bailey was the epitome of not like other girls, and while this could be true, I felt like she fell more into the category of not like other teens. She was a tiny bit pretentious but I don't mind so much.
I found myself skimming through some of the pages because while sweet, this book was not always engaging.
For the first 30% of the book, I absolutely hated the hero. He was a pretty, ambitionless, bully and I was hard-pressed to find reasons why I should root for the heroine to fall in love with him. Although the author did a relatively good job of rehabilitating him, I don't think I fully bought it; especially because after his rehabilitation, he was never seen interacting with his friends. After the first few pages, the hero's friends are conveniently out of the picture and instead he spends most of the time with the heroine and her friends, immersed in her life. While I think this served to show the hero in a better light, it was hardly realistic. He didn't move to a new place and therefore, he would definitely have had to encounter his old friends and reckon with what the “new him” would mean for those old relationships. Would he stand up to them and call out the ways in which they were and continue to be horrible to people like the heroine? Would he revert to who he used to be when he was around them? I think in order to really buy this change, it would have been good to see him in some of his old spaces, with his old friends. Or at the very least, making new friends who share his new interests (whether male or female).
Additionally, I found the heroine's business personally conflicting. I know that in that time period especially, her business and her products must have been empowering for women. However, I have always hade a mostly hate-sometimes love relationship with makeup and I think this largely bleeds into my reading of the book and curbs my enjoyment. I understand that for someone who was told from a young age that she wasn't beautiful, these products would have been an amazing confidence booster but I think in general I prefer narratives where the ugly duckling character evolves to place zero importance on looks as opposed to feeling beautiful in the end. Perhaps this comes from the privilege of being someone who while not considered attractive, has never been bullied for her looks. However, in general, I believe there's too much emphasis being placed on everyone feeling beautiful when I think as a society we should be moving away from the great premium we place on beauty.
Finally, I couldn't help thinking about the fact that cosmetic businesses like the heroine's, which may have started off as empowering, have contributed to the insane beauty standards that women today have to measure up to. I know it's unfair to retroactively place this burden on historical figures. However, these were the thoughts that were running through my mind as I was reading the book and they stopped me from having an enjoyable immersive experience.
I will probably read another Rodale book because I think my less-than-stellar reading experience had more to do with my own personal issues than with the book's quality
Normally, I would have stopped reading this book much earlier than I did but I'm trying nowadays to not immediately dnf a book because there's one aspect of it that irritates me. After this book I might have to return to my initial policy.
My first minor irritation was that the heroine, a 30 year old woman, was waiting for her crush to ask her out and was sending pheromones his way to push him in that direction. She was then hurt and surprised when it turned out he had had a girlfriend for one year who was now his fiancé. Well, no kidding, did you expect him to magically get a whiff of your pheromones and immediately understand that he HAD to ask you out? As opposed to oh I don't know, you asking him out yourself? What was it exactly that was stopping her from making the first move again? I honestly couldn't tell you. However, in an effort to be more tolerant I shelved that issue.
Then the heroine's mother's staunch feminism was treated as a punchline. And while there was no overt anti feminism (at least in the portion that I read), there seemed to be a slight suggestion in the tone of the writing, that feminism was an overreaction. I think it would have been one thing for the heroine to have more traditional views of marriage than her mother and want more traditional things without her mother's views being treated as faintly ridiculous.
Also before going to Missouri, her mother directly tells her to “watch out for racists”( I want to add that this neither read as sarcastic nor tongue in cheek). What? Who says that? As someone who left her predominantly black country at 17 to live in a predominantly white country, my mum certainly never told me to watch out for racists. And now I feel cheated. After reading that line it became increasingly clear to me that this book was not written by a person of color because it seemed like an outsider's approximation of the kind of conversations that people of color have with their parents before moving to places where there are fewer people who look like them. Or maybe all caricatured biracial NYU gender studies professors tell their daughters to “watch out for racists”. How would I know?
Despite all this, I still persevered.
Then finally our intrepid heroine gets to Missouri and meets the hero's mum, who immediately tells her to distract the hero from his girlfriend(who just had a miscarriage!) by showing some boob. And guess who just went along with this idea, to the point of shopping with the mum for a whole new sexy dress? You guessed it. Our heroine (I can't for the life of me remember her name). This. This was finally the point where I threw in the towel. I realized that I was firmly in crazy town and it was only going to get worse from here. So I finally did the responsible thing and dnfed the book. I mean this is probably my longest review and I barely got 40% into the book. I would probably have written a 300 page review if I had had to finish reading this novel.
There are a few things I must preface this review with.
1. I read this book when I was way too young to read this book
2. For a long time, it was one of my favourite books
3. I reread it recently because it occurred to me that it probably hadn't aged well. I was right.
The hero is an abuser and a rapist. No matter how hard the book tries to rehabilitate him, and it does try hard, nothing can take away from his abuse or the rape. Also, if this were any other author, I would probably have given the book 1 star, but SEP was one of the authors that led me to read contemporary romance as a young teenage girl, and thus I am a bit biased. Also, no one writes banter quite like SEP.
However, the fact that I read this as a young teenager is the exact reason why books which romanticize abuse suck. Young impressionable people may pick them up and use them as a blueprint for a relationship. The very thought gives me nightmares. I may be saying this because I spent a lot of my younger years loving SEP, but I have to point out that this book was written in the 90s. It doesn't excuse the abusive content in the least but it makes me a smidge less ragey about it.
Running the plot of a few more SEP books through my mind, I am coming to terms with the fact that a lot of books I have considered favourites may sour on a reread.
I am realising that just as I had to give up on my OG historical romance faves, Julia Quinn and Lisa Kleypas, I might have to give up SEP, and that breaks my heart because I do love her banter.
More chick-lit than romance. Had a few good moments but I felt myself skimming a good chunk of the book because it was all over the place. Also like a lot of chick lit, the mcs didn't spend much time together on the page yet by the end they were proclaiming their love for each other?
I think the book had potential though and I'll likely try another book of hers just to see if some of the above mentioned issues get resolved.
After the Hating Game this was a big disappointment. I'm not really convinced the two main characters were really in love.They spend most of the book hurting each other and while this premise works for an enemies-to-lovers story like the Hating Game, it falls flat in what is supposed to be a friends-to-lovers book. Even in the Hating Game by about 50% of the book the main characters are being nice to each other but here, under the guise of friendship they hurt each other mercilessly.
This still gets 3 stars because Sally Thorne can write.
I'm going to have to read the Hating Game again just to reassure myself that I really did like it