CBR18 Book 15: "The Proposal" by Jasmine Guillory

Page count: 325 pages

Rating: 3.5 stars

Nowhere Book Bingo 26: BIPOC rep by a BIPOC author

Reading Rainbow - Orange cover

Nikole "Nik" Paterson is bored and uncomfortable at a baseball game with her handsome, if rather self-centred, actor boyfriend, and his bros. She is absolutely blindsided when he surprises her with a public proposal, via the scoreboard, and to add insult to injury, he didn't even spell her name correctly. Nik is mortified, her boyfriend is insulted by her rejection, and things are about to take a nasty turn when a couple of strangers come to Nik's rescue.

Carlos Ibarra and his sister witness the proposal first-hand from a few rows behind her and when Nik's scorned boyfriends storms off, and a camera crew appears to be on their way to interview Nik, his sister insists that they step in and pretend to be close friends of Nik's, so they can lead her off to safety and away from the public eye and further embarrassment. They take Nik to a bar where her supportive friends are waiting, and share some drinks to decompress after the humiliating event.

Nik is certainly not ready for anything serious again any time soon, but her friends keep encouraging her to keep in touch with the handsome and kind Carlos, and it doesn't take long before they embark on a rebound relationship. Carlos takes his responsibility to his family members extremely seriously and doesn't want to be tied down to a long-term girlfriend. Nik just wants some uncomplicated sex and fun. Surely they can keep things casual and not catch feelings, right?

Jasmine Guillory seems to be a big favourite among some romance readers online, and while her books are fine, they just never seem to be all that memorable to me, and I only read about one a year. As is so often the case with me, I'm yet again way behind on my reviews, and having finished this book in the middle of February, I'm having a lot of trouble remembering specifics of the plot.

What I do remember:

- Carlos has this idea that he needs to be free to drop everything at a moment's notice in case any member of his family, close or extended, needs anything. Since he already works as a paediatrician, a job that demands a lot of his time, he has convinced himself that he can't have a girlfriend who will also make demands on his time. 

- Nik's ex-boyfriend is a real tool, and after being rejected (in front of a huge crowd of people, in an event he orchestrated), he starts sending her threatening messages. As a result, she drags her two best friends along for a self-defence class that they all end up loving. When he finally tries to confront her towards the end of the book, the lessons prove to have been very useful.

- One of Nik's friends runs a cupcake bakery and seems to need a lot of help, which keeps putting Nik and Carlos in close proximity to one another. 

- Carlos' cousin is pregnant, and her pregnancy is a complicated one. This means that he worries even more about her than any of his other relatives. 

- Both Carlos and Nik have many justifications to themselves about why they're not ready or able to commit to anyone in a long-term relationship, which means it takes a frustratingly long time for both of them to admit that they have feelings for each other. 

I don't regret having spent money on this (chances are, I got it in an e-book sale) or spending time reading it, but I doubt it will become a comfort re-read in the future for me. 

Judging a book by its cover: I like this new cover design a lot better than the original, which had a very nice blue background, but just faces in profile, seemingly floating on the edges of the cover. Not very appealing. This sunset view is much prettier. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read

CBR17 Book 16: "Scythe & Sparrow" by Brynne Weaver

Page count: 416 pages

Audio book length: 11 hrs 36 mins

Rating: 4 stars

Buzzword Cover Challenge 25: Transportation

Doctor Fionn Kane is doing just fine in the little Nebraska town he retreated to after leaving his promising surgical career and ex-fiancee behind. He doesn't really want anything to do with the past-times of either of his brothers and is keeping his head down, running and working out when he's not working in his small medical clinic or the hospital. He also crochets. Then a beautiful woman with a severe leg injury ends up nearly unconscious on the floor of his clinic, asking him for help before she passes out. Fionn doesn't realise that despite his attempts to live a calm and uneventful life, chaos has just found him.

Rose Evans has worked at Silveria Circus for over a decade. She has a fortune telling booth, reading tarot cards for paying customers, and also rides her motorcycle every evening in death-defying stunts. She's also has a very particular interest in botany, and as the Sparrow, she has provided many a woman with the means to incapacitate or kill an abusive partner. Normally, she doesn't do any of the killing herself, but when an obviously terrified woman comes to her for a reading, and Rose is able to figure out where the family lives, she decides to take matters (and a baseball bat) into her own hands, to rid the family of their abusive husband/father. Except Rose seriously underestimates the rage and strength of the man she attacks, and ends up with a badly broken leg before she manages to jam some cocktail sticks in the guy's eye, giving her enough time to escape on her motorcycle. She locates the local clinic, desperate to find something for the pain, and passes out shortly after the handsome doctor finds her.

A circus performer with a broken leg can't do her job, so the travelling circus leaves Rose and her RV in Nebraska, planning to pick her up once she's had time to heal. On crutches, after the complicated break, Rose isn't able to mount the stairs to her RV. Fionn has a spare room in his house and surprises himself by inviting the intriguing woman to stay with him until she's had time to recover. Fionn is used to depriving himself of the things he truly desires, so staying away from Rose, his patient, should be fine, right?

Readers of the rest of Brynne Weaver's Ruinous Love trilogy, will have already met Fionn and Rose in Butcher & Blackbird (when Ronan and Sloane show up unexpectedly requiring medical help they can't really get from a hospital) and in Leather & Lark, where the final events left things looking pretty critical for Rose (spoiler: she doesn't die). Plot-wise, the events of this book start a while before Ronan and Sloane show up, and continues as a sequel to both previous books, so the readers can discover how Rose is pulled back from death's door. 

Having read the previous two books, I felt like I already had an idea of who Fionn and Rose were as characters, but it was nevertheless fun to see them more deeply developed. The reveal that Fionn crochets in his spare time, along with a bunch of small-town grannies was a very fun one. Unlike his brothers, Fionn has chosen to heal people rather than to unalive them, but he still feels immense guilt for the role he played in the demise of their abusive father, and has never felt able to confide in his brothers about this. Rose, on the other hand, seems to have quite a death toll that she facilitated by giving other women the means to be free of their abusers. It's only in this book that she decides to try to take a more active hand in murdering violent and unpleasant men, and because she is very impulsive, it rarely goes the way she plans. Poor Fionn has to get her out of trouble more than once. 

Rating the books of the trilogy, Leather & Lark is my least favourite, while Butcher & Blackbird remains my absolute favourite (none of the other books have made me that obsessed), putting Scythe & Sparrow firmly in the middle. Of the three, this is probably the book with the most mutual pining (while Ronan pines for years for Sloane, she's pretty oblivious to all of it), and our protagonists are very attracted to one another from the start, but not willing, or in some cases able, to act on it. In the last third of this book, Fionn and Rose are separated for much of it, and as a result, correspond in letters. As a result, I would probably say it's the most romantic of the three. 

This book has the same narrators as Leather & Lark and is once more a dual narration. I really like this kind of storytelling, and since the narrators also voiced Lark and Lachlan in the previous book, there is some nice continuity. 

In one of the two epilogues to this story, Ms. Weaver gives some hints towards what she's likely to be writing about next. It seems to be a spin-off of sorts from these books, and by now, I am enjoying her storytelling enough that I'll probably get the next one too.

Judging a book by its cover: I genuinely don't know why there is a scythe featured on the cover, as far as I recall, one is never used by any of the characters, protagonists or antagonists, and therefor it seems a bit unnecessary. All the other elements that we see in yellow and orange on the cover at least feature in the book at some point. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read. 

CBR14 Book 6: "The Worst Guy" by Kate Canterbary

Page count: 340 pages

Rating: 4.5 stars

Sebastian Stremmel is a trauma surgeon at a large Boston hospital, rumoured to be the chief of staff's pick for the next chief of surgery. He's also known to be grumpy, rather antisocial, and a workaholic. Sara Shapiro is an introverted plastic surgeon working at the same hospital who forces herself to be cheerful and friendly in public to hide her own social anxiety and unease around others. Sebastian finds Sara annoyingly chirpy, she finds him unbelievably rude and arrogant. They try to avoid one another as much as possible, despite living in the same apartment building along with other surgeons from the hospital. 

After Sara furiously confronts Sebastian about the treatment of a patient of hers, a series of unlikely events lead to a wrecked exam room in the ER. The two doctors find themselves forced to do eight weeks of mandatory conflict resolution counseling, which not only involves weekly meetings with a therapist but a lot of homework where they have to spend time together outside of work. It doesn't take long before their extreme antagonism causes a reaction and they find themselves tearing each other's clothes off after every mandatory counseling session. Initially, they keep studiously avoiding one another outside the therapy sessions, assigned "homework" interactions, or their hate f*cking sessions. As the weeks proceed, however, they slowly begin to share more personal stuff and their feelings begin to change.

As far as I could tell, several of the supporting characters in this book have featured in other Canterbary novels in the past. I'm assuming Sebastian and possibly also Sara may have appeared previously in a supporting capacity, but I didn't feel like I was missing out on any significant backstory by beginning with this book.

Both Sebastian and Sara have significant emotional baggage which makes it difficult for them to open up to others and neither are exactly wildly sociable. Sebastian is part of an established friend group of doctors, who keep wanting to include Sara as well. While he's frequently surly and stand-offish and very much a workaholic, his friends clearly accept him, flaws and all, and he doesn't seem to mind the gentle ribbing he gets from them. Sara projects a pleasant and outgoing facade in public because she has learned to be a people pleaser, but in private she's nothing like her chirpy work persona and keeps to herself. She tries to avoid social situations because anything involving food and/or drink will likely become deeply awkward since she has extremely strict dietary needs since she's recovering from a serious eating disorder and her body cannot handle a lot of foods and certainly not alcohol without her getting violently ill.

One of the things about her that drive Sebastian up the wall is the small bags of snacks she keeps carrying everywhere and insists on grazing from. Yet even before he discovers the true reason for her odd snacking habits, his need to nurture and care for others manifests itself, and he begins silently picking out and removing the parts of the trail mix she never eats so she won't have to worry about them. There are a lot of such show, don't tell moments throughout the story, where Canterbary show the readers who her protagonists really are, and why they'd be so perfect for one another. 

With my reading slump this year, just finding a book that so fully holds my attention that I finish it in less than a weekend is a great feeling, and while I wanted to give this book a full five stars (I might, upon a reread), I did think there were a bit too many angsty moments of "oh, I'm not good enough for him/her" in the latter half of the book before I got to the satisfying happy ending. Still, I will absolutely be seeking out more of Canterbary's novels, to see if any of her many other books are as entertaining and satisfying as this one. 

Judging a book by its cover: You don't often see bearded heroes on the covers of romance novels, at least not if the character in question isn't a biker or lumberjack or some such. As our protagonist in question is a surgeon at the top of his field, one might wonder if the beard is even something someone whose job it is to perform surgery should have, what with the associated hygiene risks. Having looked it up, it seems it is OK for surgeons to have facial hair, but they have to wear additional protective gear to ensure the patients' safety. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.