Delilah Green Doesn't Care

“She couldn't change anyone's mind, couldn't make someone love her who had no interest in doing so, and couldn't keep someone from leaving her if that's what they wanted to do.”

I am sad to say that it's been a while since I read an LGBT book and I am so happy that this was the one I picked up.

Small town, tattooed photographer and a single parent? This was magnificent. I ate this up. When I say that I annotated this from cover to back, I mean it.

The characters of this book are what drew me into loving it as much as I did. Delilah was a character I didn't expect to love and relate to so much. It felt like I was falling in love with her along with Claire. She had a feisty and take no prisoners attitude on the surface but underneath it all, she just wanted to feel like she belonged. Delilah had been hurt so many times in her life and had begun to believe it was because of her own doing. It was so refreshing to see her learn to accept herself and the love she deserves. Claire was such a beautiful character and I loved seeing her also realise she deserved good things too.

I would love a book about Iris. I found her hilarious and would just devour anything with her present in it.

I loved that underneath, this was more than just about the romance between Delilah and Claire. It was about friendship and family and forgiveness. The important lesson I got from this was that people aren't always what they seem, sometimes they are fighting their own battles.

I am so excited to read Astrid's story and hopefully see her get the happiness she deserves.

Hmmm...

I try to read “outside my genre” and I was intrigued by the setup on the back cover. I was also intrigued by how the back cover listed the author as a debut author, and then the About the Author caption listed her as the author of over five books that received wide acclaim. Perhaps she has a time machine.

The first scene pretty much sums up all the problems with this book. The MC wakes up after a casual hookup with a woman whose name she can't remember. A rich white woman whose name she can't remember. Every character is introduced as a “white woman” although men are merely mentioned and every character is white. The story proceeds from there into a fairly typical “beach house” sort of thing where the main character who isn't rich hangs out at country clubs and goes to brunch with people who are in a small town somewhere in the Pacific Northwest (it's either there or New England, right?). Except for the two people about to get married, everybody is trying to hook up like they're 24 years old. Even the people with kids. Even the single mom who right away is the love interest.

Other than the annoying habits the author has, such as the “white woman” mentioned above, and how all the characters are horribly irritating people, there is no tension in this story. The love interest is bisexual since her teenage years and everybody knows it, including the reader, including all the characters. There's no winning over of Claire, there's absolutely no doubt that they will at least hook up.

I picked up this book because I thought it would be an interesting window into the dynamics of lesbian relationships and expose some of the uniqueness of those relationships. Instead this is a caricature. I dare say it's a straight person's idea of what lesbians are like. Not that it's insensitive and not that I'm sensitive, but there's nothing to learn here. A more interesting story would have been these women as teenagers discovering themselves in this small town (where everybody is rich and drinks rose and has brunch every week). That's a story the author clearly thought of, but decided to write about them as adults, wherein everything is already determined and they can, honestly, do whatever they want.

So two stars because the author knows how to write. No higher because she chose to write the way she did.