I’m over at Dear Author with a review of At First Spite by Olivia Dade. A lot to like – but do read the content warnings.
Tag: contemporary (Page 9 of 122)
Fair Catch by Heidi McLaughlin, narrated by Stephanie Rose & Nelson Hobbs. Spoiler Alert: I DNF’d it.
Fair Catch was my first book by Heidi McLaughlin and I fear it is very likely to be my last. I did not enjoy it. There are plenty of people who disagree with me: the book has a 4.37 rating on Goodreads. It was just not for me. Maybe I’m too old. Maybe I just like football too much.
Kelsey Sloane is a book editor in Portland. She receives a submission for a contemporary sports romance set in the world of NFL. Not knowing anything about football herself, she wants to make sure the author has her world building correct. So, she asks an assistant at the publisher to connect her with the city’s NFL team, the Portland Pioneers, so she can verify the sports stuff in the submission for herself. That was in the blurb. I really should have known better. Still, I have gone with stranger set-ups in the past and “romance reasons” covers a lot of ground.
(Aside: if Kelsey receives a submission featuring a surgeon does she have to observe a surgery to make sure the author knows what’s she’s talking about? Kelsey – Google/YouTube/Wikipedia is your friend.)
Anyway, because (and this, I could – mostly -believe) the assistant’s roommate works with the team, Kelsey is invited to a practice where, rather improbably, the coach assigns the centre, Alex Moore, to teach Kelsey all about football, instead of, you know, the assistant’s roommate who works with the team).
Alex is immediately deeply smitten (understatement) and wants to pursue a relationship. Kelsey is extremely naïve and my impression was that she didn’t really understand the level of Alex’s interest in her, nor his celebrity. She was very diligent and apparently skilled at her job but she seemed otherwise fairly clueless. (Perhaps that impression would have changed had I listened to more of the book.) For example: she asks Alex how to watch football (on her TV) as she doesn’t know how. Which… really? (Yes, I know some games are on cable but still.)
Alex invites her to a game. He messages her that he’s left a ticket for her. She doesn’t go because she thinks the game is next weekend instead of the weekend he tells her he’s left a ticket for her because that makes sense.
When she doesn’t show at the game, Alex’s teammates suggest he has to go bigger to really get her to understand how much he’s into her. They say he should get her sideline passes. SIDELINE PASSES.
I’m an Australian. Yes, I support the 49ers (go Niners!) and watch NFL so I know something about American football but even so it does not take much research (oh the irony) to know that sideline passes to games are not given out willy nilly. The NFL closely controls who is allowed on the sidelines. A book editor and would-be girlfriend of the team’s center is not ever going to be given a sideline pass. I seriously doubt it’s even possible for a center to obtain a sideline pass to an NFL game. There’s a reason Taylor Swift is in a box at the Chiefs games (except if they win the AFC Championship; then she’s on the field with Travis’s family on the field to watch the trophy presentation and to celebrate).
Then, at about chapter 6 or so, it is casually thrown into the story that the Portland Pioneers won the Super Bowl the year before. And I just couldn’t. Can you imagine the Chiefs allowing some random book editor onto their practice field and Andy Reid assigning an actual player to teach said editor about football? It’s beyond belief. My eyes were sore from the all the rolling.
World building means something to me and I could not believe the world this book was set in. It seemed to me like everything was just a flimsy excuse for two people to get together and have what I’m sure would be a lot of hot sex. And yes, to one degree, that’s what happens in romance – if you squint.
I love romance and I love a good hot sex scene. I even love a guy who is gone over his lady. But I do need a story around it that makes sense to me and Fair Catch did not. At least not up until that point and after then I was out.
Both Stephanie Rose and Nelson Hobbs are skilled and talented narrators. I’ve listened to both before. However, they were not enough to save the book for me. I didn’t listen to enough of the book to make much more comment on the narration other than that it was good in terms of character differentiation, pacing and tone, as I’d expect from this pair.
Probably if someone doesn’t know anything about NFL and/or doesn’t care, then Fair Catch would work better for them than it did for me. For me however: DNF.
I’m over at Dear Author with a review of When Grumpy Met Sunshine by Charlotte Stein. This one had me laughing out loud most of the way through the book.
I’m over at Dear Author with a review of Love, Naturally by Sophie Sullivan. Entertaining low-conflict and low heat contemporary romance.
I’m over at Dear Author with a review of Wild Life by Opal Wei. Funny, sweet whirlwind romance.
It’s a Date (Again) by Jeneva Rose, narrated by January LaVoy. Entertaining story, excellent narration.
It’s a Date (Again) begins after Peyton Sanders has left an encounter with an unnamed man who had confessed his love for her. She told him she did not love him back but as she’s walking down the street, she’s devastated and crying. She meets an unhoused man, who offers her some advice and as a result, she realises that the only reason she’s so upset is that she does in fact love this man – she’s just terrified of things going wrong. Fresh with the realisation that she made a mistake and desperate to correct it, she’s running back toward her man when she’s hit by a car. She wakes up four days later in the hospital, with almost no memories. One of her BFFs, Mya, with whom she was on the phone at the time of the accident, knows she was in love with someone but Peyton had not yet shared his name.
When three men turn up to the hospital shortly after Peyton wakes, each claiming to be her boyfriend, Mya proposes that Peyton date each again to determine which one is her true love. (Peyton had been non-exclusively dating, each man knew this so there’s no cheating.) Is it Tyler, the construction worker, Sean, the business consultant, or Nash, the chef?
Peyton’s other BFF, Robbie, thinks she should wait until she’s better before putting this pressure on herself but he comes around to the notion after Peyton becomes aware of their “marriage pact” made when they were both 19 and in college. If neither were in a serious relationship by the time she turned 32 (which is in just two weeks), they would get together.
Experienced romance readers know exactly where this one is going of course.
A couple of few things:
Is the US health system so bad that someone waking up from the coma is discharged the same day with only a check of vital signs?
Peyton doesn’t have any broken bones and apart from some scratches on her hands and her memory loss, has no other injuries to speak of. There’s not much by way of even a headache. After she gets out of hospital there’s mention of the scratches on her hands and taking some medication but otherwise, she’s A-ok. I guess she was just lucky??
Why a marriage pact which matures on Peyton’s 32nd birthday? That seemed pretty random. (It was never explained in the book.)
The story takes place almost entirely over two weeks. I kept tripping over the fact that Peyton was in a coma only days before (in one instance the day before) and she was already going out and dating. It seemed too unbelievable.
I know “romance reasons” exist but these things did make me roll my eyes a bit.
Still, if one can overlook those pesky details, the story was otherwise fun. It’s the sort of book one can easily envisage as a movie actually. The episodic nature of it suits cinema. It has the heat level of a mainstream PG13 movie too. (That’s fine – it didn’t need more and I didn’t feel anything was lacking.)
One of the three guys turned out to be a real jerk (of course) but there was a bit of a mismatch with the way he was presented at first. It seemed like he’d suddenly had a personality transplant. I put it down to the author not wanting readers to feel sorry for him when he was not “the one”.
I knew who Peyton loved from the beginning but I nevertheless enjoyed the journey to her (second) realisation of it. I also enjoyed the friendship between Debbie (Peyton’s landlord and kind-of fairy godmother), Mya and Robbie. Mya is a stand-up comedian and there were more than a few laughs in the story as a result.
Listeners may wish to know that the story references prior death of both of Peyton’s parents in a car accident.
The narration was one of the main draws for me as I’d not read this author before. But January LaVoy is a fantastic narrator and I knew she would keep my ears entertained if nothing else. She has a great range of character voices and excellent acting skills which shine through in her performance. There’s a reason she’s one of my favourite narrators. I especially like her male character voices – though I sometimes wonder how she gets them so deep and/or rough/husky without hurting her voice.
With so many potential “heroes” Ms LaVoy had an opportunity to display multiple lead voices to (maybe) keep listeners guessing. Any one of them would have worked.
It’s A Date (Again) was entertaining and enjoyable, so long as you don’t think too much about some of the plot details – and paired with narration the calibre of January LaVoy’s, I count it a win.
Grade: B
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