Julie Anne Long has a lot of credit with me. She wrote What I Did for a Duke, which is a top 5 all time, top 3 historical romance for me. It is wonderful and amazing and you all should go read it right now. I’ll write about this mediocre effort while I wait.
Ms. Long has decided to try her hand at contemporaries. Her effort is there. There’s some smolder there, but overall it just wasn’t the same.
John Tennessee McCord, famous tv actor, ends up in Hellcat Canyon (tiny town out near Tahoe), when his truck breaks down as he was driving around looking at where they’d be filming his next tv show. Britt Langley is a waitress in town and there hiding from the world for her own reasons. They meet and there’s instant chemistry. Britt is running from her past and so is JT, but his comes back to find him.
It was all just okay. JT and Britt were so ridiculously perfect for the first 50% and then some it was just obnoxious. A famous tv actor, who’s sensitive, a reader, a black belt, and a carpenter. Yeah, yeah, sursies. After the story takes it’s turn they both just stopped communicating to each other and turned even more annoying. I just couldn’t care about them. Also there’s a ton of setup for other books to come in the series, and it really felt like folks were getting inserted left and right just so we could meet everyone in town. It did not feel natural.
Anywho, all this is to say, I shall still keep reading Ms. Long, her credit is still pretty damn high. This was fine. It passed the time while nursing, but it wasn’t memorable.
Just this weekend, I was wondering, “Didn’t Julie Anne Long have a book coming out, a contemporary?” and then decided to take a wait a see approach. So I have two responses to finding out the new book is nothing special:
A. Clearly my kissing book sense was tingling and en pointe.
B. I’m not going to bother with it. Heroes who are actors are really unappealing to me.
“en pointe” or “on point”?
As someone who used to speak English for a living shouldn’t I know which one to use?
The next one in the series is coming out any day now, but that’s a definite skip for me. There’s one hero set up for a future book I’ll probably come back for, but otherwise I was pretty underwhelmed.
In a nutshell this is why I struggle with contemporaries. I can suspend disbelief that a Duke has both enormous wealth and also the tan muscled thighs of Zeus (because hunting, obvs.). But when these professional, sensitive, athletic, millionaires show up in contemporaries the eyeroll is too strong to get past.
I don’t mind the athletes (depending on the sport) and I can *maybe* but up with musician, but actors are right out (except for Richard in Act Like It but he’s a British stage actor and that somehow makes it different).
Apparently Kirkus named Wild at Whiskey Creek (the upcoming sequel to this) one of its top ten romances of the year. It’s probably worth pointing out that said list also contains Marrying Winterborne by Lisa Kleypas which was fine, but not great; A Scot in the Dark by Sarah Maclean, which was a hot mess with some admirably feminist ideals thrown in; First Star I See Tonight by Susan Elizabeth Phillips, which was fun, but nowhere near her best one, plus a Sonali Dev book (after The Bollywood Bride I am deeply distrustful of any list that contains any of her books.) The list DOES contain A Promise of Fire by Amanda Bouchet, which will be in my Top 10 (of all genres I read) this year – it was a great read, so maybe consider it? The first couple of Pennyroyal Green books weren’t exactly gold standard either.
Long will always get a LOT of chances for What I Did for a Duke. I love that book so much, but Hot in Hellcat Canyon was middling at best, and I while I seem to end up reading a lot of contemporaries starring athletes or rock stars, the ones that work the best for me are the ones with just regular people (see Julie James’ Chicago-set books). I agree with Alexis that suspending disbelief with all these billionaires showing up in contemporaries frequently gets difficult and the premise of this just didn’t work well for me.
Having now skimmed through the various top 10 lists of the year on Kirkus, their decision making is clearly super flawed, as The Hating Game doesn’t appear on any of their lists, romance or otherwise. As Mrs. J pointed out in her review, it’s clearly the best romance of the year.
Exactly. Long gets almost infinite chances thanks to WIDFAD, but I will choose to take a wait and see approach on ones who’s themes are not my favorite, such as the new one with you ruined my family by putting my brother in jail. That’s a personal big ole’ pile of meh for me. I’ll let you read it, and then trust your opinion. I knew to temper expectations for this one thanks to your review, I just needed something in the moment.
I am still retroactively mad at the list that I got the Bollywood Bride recommendation from, because it claimed it was FEMINIST (for those of you who missed out on that book club train wreck – it was NOT).
I don’t put a lot of weight in Kirkus’ lists.