This was a hmmmm. It was both interesting and irritating. PattyKates vigorously encouraged us to read this so they would have more people to discuss it with, and Katie kindly lent me her copy. I’m glad I read it. It’s better if you don’t know too much going in, so I’ll keep things general.
Parker Cruse hasn’t been able to get her life together. She gave up an athletic scholarship to follow her high school boyfriend to college (don’t do that). She thought they were going to get married and start a life in the big city together. Instead she found him in bed with her twin sister Piper. Instead of starting a career and married life, she has stalled out living at her parent’s house and bouncing from temp job to temp job. She and her sister no longer have a relationship. Her ex is now her brother in law and her sister is pregnant.
Trying to get her life together, she moves out, but just to a family house nearby. Her first day in her new house she meets her hot, married neighbor, Gus. They are immediately attracted to one another. Gus’ wife hires Parker to be her at home assistant, throwing the two of them together.
What the book does really well is explore Parker’s emotional life, guilt, grief, and forgiveness. Parker needs to do a lot of growing up. What the book does less well is slapping romance tropes on what deserves to be a complicated story. It was an engrossing read with a twist that packs an emotional punch, but in the end I was left feeling unsatisfied.
Without getting into spoilers, I think the writer didn’t think through a lot of issues. So while she got important things about the emotional authenticity of the novel right, a lot of details were not well handled. It moves the book from the great book it could be, to the ok book it is.
One example is a celebration night Parker has with friends. They go from a bar to a brewery, where Parker’s friend orders her a Coors Light. WHAT?? You do NOT go to a brewery and order Coors Light, unless it is the Coors Brewery, and even then, no one should ever order Coors Light in any situation. It’s not a huge thing, but it made me question how much the author thought through what she was writing.
Thank you for pointing out the Coors Lite issue. I thought I was just being a beer snob when I reacted so negatively to that!
I am unapologetically a snob, but the Coors light thing doesn’t work snobbery or no. The whole point of a brewery restaurant is that they carry the beer they brew, not Coors Light. Even if there was a Coors brewery restaurant in Des Moines (Coors is a Colorado company, so that’s unlikely), you still wouldn’t order a Coors Light for your friend unless you hate them. If the author wasn’t willing to do 2 minutes of research to identify actual breweries in Des Moines (I found 3 with no effort), she could at least have had her character order a summer blonde ale. Why bother placing your characters in a brewery and then not doing the bare minimum of research? I have feelings about this. Apparently.
See, this is the sort of thing I would know absolutely nothing about since I a) don’t know a thing about American beer and b) I don’t drink alcohol at all. Hence all reference to drinking in contemporary romance goes straight over my head.
I too loved this book but at the end felt like there were alot of unanswered questions that could have taken this book up a notch! I enjoyed the read and the idea of it all just felt alot more could have been added to help me understand why and how to alot of things and situations left on the back burner as expected for us to forget about due to the new romance at hand.?