Rating: 4.5 stars
Nowhere Book Bingo: Book with a LGBTQIA+ author and main character
CBR16 Sweet Books: New (author and series)
CBR16 Book Bingo: Pride
Delilah Green grew up in Bright Falls, in the care of her wealthy, but emotionally cold stepmother (after her father died), and never managed to forge a connection to her always perfect stepsister Astrid either. Astrid had her two best friends, Claire and Iris, and more than once Delilah overheard them saying mean things about her. When she got the chance, she left Bright Falls for New York and has rarely been back since. She lives for her photography, and after many years, her career finally seems to be taking off.
But now Astrid is getting married and insists on having Delilah be the wedding photographer. The promise of a very large paycheck and heaping on a fair amount of emotional blackmail means Delilah can't really say no. Imagine her surprise, when on her first night back, she's propositioned at the local bar by none other than Astrid's BFF Claire, who doesn't even recognise Delilah at first. Suddenly the next few weeks before the wedding are looking more entertaining, and if she manages to piss off Astrid by seducing her friend, so much the better.
Claire Sutherland has been a single mother for most of her eleven-year-old daughter's life. The girl's father has proven unreliable and is more often than not away. So Claire runs the Bright Falls bookstore and tries to provide stability and order to both her daughter's and her own life. She doesn't like the man her best friend is engaged to, and really needs to get laid. So she takes a challenge from her friend Iris to approach an interesting-looking woman at the bar, and is rather shocked when she realises it's Delilah that she's hit on.
While Claire tries to resist Delilah, spending more time with her as an adult shows Claire that while they grew up in the same town, and Claire and Iris spent a lot of time in the same house as Delilah and Astrid, they never really knew Delilah, and certainly not who she has made herself into after she left town. Since the guy Astrid is marrying is absolutely awful, Claire, Iris and Delilah agree to team up to make Astrid come to her senses and call off the wedding, which obviously means spending more time together during the wedding preparations. What's the harm in spending some alone time with Delilah at night as well?
I'm not sure why it took me so long to read this book. I'd heard great things about it on so many corners of the internet. As so often happens, I bought it in an e-book sale and then got distracted by something else tempting and shining on my insurmountable TBR-list. The Nowhere Book Bingo gave me an excuse to read the book, and thanks to my complete inability to keep up with my review backlog, I'm now also able to use it to fulfil the "Pride" square for the Cannonball Read 16 Bingo card as well. Being slow sometimes pays off.
I really liked most things about this book, and probably Claire most of all. She's a hard-working single mother, who had a kid before she was really ready for it, with a man who certainly wasn't ready for fatherhood or commitment. She runs a bookstore and doesn't want to start anything that might ruin the stability of her daughter's life. She's kind and loyal, and once Delilah actually lets her in a bit, she understands how much she, Astrid and Iris misunderstood Delilah when they were growing up.
Delilah has not had an easy life and is definitely prickly and slow to trust because of it. Having lost both her biological parents at an early age, with the only parental figure left to her being Astrid's cold and callous mother, she has developed a "leave them before they can leave you" attitude, and all her sexual conquests are purely of a temporary nature (usually only one-night-stands). Having worked hard to become a recognised photographer, she is presented with an excellent career opportunity at the start of this book, which is complicated by her promise to Astrid to photograph the upcoming wedding.
Astrid initially seems like a perfectionist ice queen, but as the story progresses, it becomes clear that the rejection Delilah felt growing up wasn't necessarily one-way. Delilah was just too caught up in her own feelings to notice Astrid's attempts at reaching out to her stepsister, and if she'd been a bit more willing to speak to her sister as an adult, a lot of the negative feelings between them could have been resolved with a conversation or two.
The secondary plot of this novel is all about how Delilah, Claire and Iris decide to team up to show Astrid what an absolute douché-canoe her fiancé is, through a series of elaborate plots. As the second book in the series seems to have Astrid finding love with someone NOT her horrible boyfriend in this one, I was pretty sure their scheme would probably meet with success eventually.
I really liked this, but didn't feel I could give it a full five stars, mainly because of how much of the plot could have been resolved by some frank conversations between some of the characters, be it Delilah and Claire or Delilah and Astrid. Situations like that always frustrate me. Nevertheless, this was a really enjoyable book, and I'm looking forward to reading Astrid and Iris' stories at a future date.
Judging a book by its cover: In a world with so many dreadful book covers, Leni Kaufman keeps knocking it out of the park, and she always draws really good representations of the actual characters in the book. Delilah and Claire both look absolutely phenomenal here and the hand-holding is so cute.
Crossposted on Cannonball Read.
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