Audio book length: 10 hrs 45 mins
Rating: 4 stars
This was an ARC I won from the author in a Facebook contest (!) I know, right? My opinions are my own.
Gretchen Miller is a self-proclaimed badass, and she's not lying. After growing up with financial instability, food insecurities and a lot of general uncertainness due to her father's unpredictability, she became determined never to have to depend on anyone ever again and started earning and saving her own money as a teenager, squirrelling it away for a future project. That project became a dance studio for kids, known as "Miss Miller's from Minnetonka". Recently, about to turn 40, she's decided to "expand her empire", and is in the process of buying a second building, intending to expand to yoga and pilates classes. She has also decided that she is DONE with men, after years of disappointing deadbeat boyfriends and terrible Tinder dates.
Gretchen doesn't really have time to take a whole month off from expanding her business, but to help out a friend of a friend, she agrees to mentor kids at a summer camp in the woods. Being away from civilisation and with limited cell service will hopefully help with her "man cleanse" and further her ambitions of "becoming a crone".
Tennyson "Teddy" Knight agreed to take a job at the same summer camp without even realising it was going to involve teenagers (he didn't read the fine print). He just needed to get away after the dramatic breakup of his band, where he became tabloid fodder after trashing a hotel room. Teddy's not really an outdoorsy person, doesn't know anything about how to relate to teenagers and is generally a grumpy misanthrope. However, time away from tabloid attention and the opportunity to work on a revenge album sounds good to him.
To begin with, Gretchen pegs Teddy as an entitled asshole because he mistook her for an overenthusiastic fan when they first met and did not behave graciously, while Teddy finds Gretchen annoying and far too perky. Her worldview seems to be the exact opposite of his. With cabins right next to each other in the woods, and a lot of time on their hands, they develop a tentative friendship as the days go by, and discover that they have a lot more in common than they would have imagined at first. Taking on board the idea of temporary camp friendships, they seem able to be open to one another about a lot of stuff they've never really told anyone else about.
All the talking furthers the mutual attraction between them, and after about twelve hours lost in the woods together, Gretchen decides to ask Teddy to be her "last hurrah", one last fling before she embraces her crone status and gives up men and dating forever. Since they agree that it's purely physical and has a set end date when Gretchen leaves the camp, neither of them has hangups about a lot of the stuff that's complicated dating for them in the past. Of course, when it's time for Gretchen to actually leave and return to her real life, it turns out that neither of them are happy with the never seeing each other again plan.
Gretchen Miller was introduced in Jenny Holiday's previous romance, Canadian Boyfriend, where she was the boss and best friend of protagonist Rory (who is now heavily pregnant, yet still a very supportive best friend). I liked Gretchen as a supporting character and even more as a protagonist in her own right. She really is a badass, and a very accomplished woman, who unfortunately has gotten so used to taking care of herself and her very structured plans for her life that she's unable to see that she may need others to take care of her occasionally as well, and that being flexible and allowing the possibility of change might be just as healthy, if not more, than having your future plans set in stone.
Teddy begins the book as quite a mess, both professionally and as a person. Having been the bassist and co-writer in a major touring rock band since his late teens, he's not really sure who he is as a person now that his band has broken up, and he's on the outs with his former best friend. He has a ton of unresolved issues because of an even more unstable and shittier childhood than Gretchen, and he starts out being angry, resentful and behaving less than great with the people around him. A month in the woods at camp turns out to be great for him, and working with teenagers and other artists makes him have some personal epiphanies and forces him to reevaluate a lot of things. His plans for a revenge album fall by the wayside pretty quickly and for the first few weeks, he seems unable to write or compose anything at all. Confronting a lot of unresolved feelings about his past also allows him to grow closer to his sister, who clearly has a lot of emotional baggage of her own because of their mother's neglect.
I listened to this in audio, and like Canadian Boyfriend, this is a duet narration, where each performer reads the dialogue and action of their character across all chapters and sections, as well as those of characters of the same gender. The narrators, Teddy Hamilton and Kit Swann did an excellent job. I really hope more romance audio books use this style of narration, it makes the story so much more immersive and I felt I got closer to each of the characters this way.
Into the Woods was a great start to my reading year. Winning it in a Facebook giveaway was a wonderful holiday surprise (especially since I had been rejected for the ARC through NetGalley the week before). It will be released on Tuesday the 7th of January and is well worth your time.
Judging a book by its cover: Leni Kaufman has yet again made a lovely and very cosy cover for this romance, although if I were to nitpick (and I will), there are no tents involved in this summer camp experience. Everyone lives in cabins.
Crossposted on Cannonball Read
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