“His heart said, This. This right here.”
I read my first Sarina Bowen title, The Year We Fell Down, a little over a year ago and since then I have both eagerly recommended and awaited for her new novels. She has two concurrent contemporary romance series at the moment, True North and Brooklyn Bruisers, as well as two M/M books co-written with Elle Kennedy, and more on the horizon. Such is Bowen’s output that I have given her a catalogue post.
Readers familiar with Bowen’s Ivy Years series may remember hockey player Leo Trevi as a really nice guy. Picking up his story when he is brought up from a farm team to join the Brooklyn Bruisers franchise, he is eager to succeed and excited to discover that his high school girlfriend, Georgia, is the team Public Relations manager.They had been entirely devoted to one another until she experienced an assault and they lost their way. Breaking up six years ago when they went off to university, she is the one that got away.
Georgia Worthington is trying to put her best professional foot forward. The Brooklyn Bruisers is a fledgling NHL franchise acquired by a Tech billionaire and she has been working around the clock to take care of the PR responsibilities. To complicate matters, her father has just been named head coach, not to mention the aforementioned arrival of Leo Trevi. During the first press conference she runs, Leo arrives and is heard on a mic threatening someone when Georgia is spoken of disrespectfully, and we’re off to the races.
I enjoyed Rookie Move while I was reading it and my recollection of Leo was correct. He’s the nicest guy in the world. A bit impulsive sometimes, but very straightforward, and he absolutely adores Georgia and I am a sucker for a smitten hero. Despite that, I am not sure that Georgia and Leo had as much dimension as they could have as balanced against her personal and professional successes, Georgia’s love life seems to have been in stasis waiting for Leo to reappear and release her from it:
“In either case, she hadn’t had a boyfriend since Leo.”
“I asked her out a couple of times and got the brushoff. Didn’t know she was waiting for you.”
Leo at least had girlfriends in university. Not nice ones though because that would mean his love for Georgia wasn’t as true somehow. I guess. I never understand it in these books when people were together when they were young, break up, and then no other person is real to them until they meet again. Georgia and Leo’s separation was not a product of inherent issues in the relationship, but of youth conspiring with trauma to drive a wedge between them. They could simply have come back together older and wiser, even if they had had serious relationships with other people.
There are two more books coming in the series and I will, no doubt, read both of them. The Ivy Years series caught lightning in bottle and included a classic novella, Blonde Date. I haven’t had as much luck with the True North books, but the two I tried were still worth the read, and she is a really good writer and that will keep me coming back.
Links to my other reviews can be found on my complete reading list of books sorted by author or Author Commentary & The Tallies Shameful.
Love your third to last paragraph. It covers at least one, if not two, tropes that may be good for your list.
1) The heroine whose sex/love life doesn’t exist without or before the hero
2) The second-chance couple whose other partners were non-existent, non-entities, or garbage
I added these:
Reunion plots requiring all other relationships of the protagonists be have been bad or insignificant.
Extended separations with an “I kept myself only unto you” element.
1) I’m glad this is better than the True North books.
2) You are totally right on both of those tropes. They are beyond ridiculous, especially for a contemporary.
In a historical, the heroine having had no other could be plausible, unless she’s a widow of independent means whose been lovering it up (which so rarely happens). In a contemporary, it seems unlikely in the extreme. The concept of female (and sometimes male) purity is so dumb anyway, it really shouldn’t be a thing in contemporary romance.