This RITA® Reader Challenge 2017 review was written by Erica. This story was nominated for the RITA® in the Mid-Length Contemporary category.
The summary:
Brothers Jude and Ryan McAllister are inseparable. When Jude stepped in to raise Ryan after the death of their mother, it became the two of them against the world. But the scars it left were bone-deep. Then Lizzie Price comes along.
Lizzie hopes Ryan’s kindness can help heal her wounds from a toxic relationship. But when she meets Jude, their powerful attraction makes him difficult to resist. The problem is, Lizzie doesn’t realize Jude and Ryan are brothers, and they don’t know they’re falling for the same girl.
By the time the truth comes out, everyone is in too deep. Ryan is in love, Jude is in denial, and Lizzie wants both brothers. All of them agree that no one deserves to get hurt. But love and desire have a way of testing even the strongest bonds.
Here is Erica's review:
I loathe this book. LOATHE. With the fiery passion of a thousand suns. It is the absolute worst.
Wow, I need to start learning to express myself, don’t I? I almost wrote a DNF review for this at the 53% mark, but since I already did that (although that was out of apathy, not complete mind-numbing rage), I tried to force myself to read it – challenging myself that maybe it wouldn’t end like I thought it would.
It did.
Spoilers probably abound, because I am just stream-of-consciousness writing to vent off my rage. CW for the book: talk of suicide, something like revenge porn, a couple of ableist phrases, etc.
So. This book starts out with our heroine, Elizabeth (called Lizzie by almost everyone), deciding to finally approach this dude, Ryan, in her Shakespeare class after she’s been crushing on him awhile. He’s really smart, and she has no talent for Shakespeare, so she asks if he’ll tutor her. He agrees, and she’s excited to finally hang out with him. That night, she goes out with friends and some chick brings along her current friend with benefits – and Lizzie and he, Jude, of course have an instant connection and attraction. They play pool and flirt.
Lizzie is gun shy about a relationship with a “bad boy” because she had a really bad experience with her ex-boyfriend, which is what led her to leave Utah and come to big bad California.
Ryan has been crushing on Lizzie for a while too, and he’s stoked about getting to hang out with her. He tells his older brother Jude about her and Jude tells Ryan about how he met this girl who has him all twisted up too. Jude has basically taken care of Ryan since they were kids – their mom died, then their uncle died, and Jude quit college to take care of his brother, and has sacrificed a lot to make their little unit of two something like a family.
Even though Lizzie (who Jude insists on calling Elizabeth) has some pretty hot chemistry with Jude, she decides that she’s going to go for safe, nice Ryan instead. She doesn’t know they’re brothers. They don’t know that both of them are hung up on the same girl.
And the drama commences.
I literally hate all of the characters in this book. If there is anyone with any redeeming qualities, it’s Ryan. He’s sweet, but he’s a little immature. Jude completely enables Ryan in staying immature. Jude.. Jude is like Angel in Buffy. He’s moody, he’s broody, he’s devastatingly hot (apparently a social worker didn’t think he’d be great guardian material because he must have an “active social life” which Jude read as code that he has a lot of sex with a lot of different women), blahblahblah. Who cares. And Lizzie is the absolute worst friggin’ person. She is so unutterably selfish, it blows my mind. Like, woman, grow the hell up and break up with Ryan and get out of their lives. You selfish, selfish cow.
This book reminded me, in a way, of Wuthering Heights. I viciously hate Cathy and Heathcliff and think they both should be horse-whipped. That’s how I felt about Jude and Lizzie.
Because of course Lizzie’s going to choose Jude. I mean, duh. When she officially starts dating Ryan she thinks about how really nice he is. And this girl – I mean, she’s making out with Jude one day, then pushing Ryan into a relationship, then making out with him, then there’s some handsy action with Jude again, and then her and Ryan start fooling around and have sex. And it’s all just… It’s weird. And I don’t know about you but I cannot STAND it when characters in a romance have sex with a person other than their future partner in the book. And all the sex was between Lizzie and Ryan. She goes from giving Ryan a blow job that Jude overhears to being a cozy little couple with inside jokes (that Ryan doesn’t get) with Jude.
God, I hate Lizzie. I hate Jude. I hate Ryan for being a clueless wimp. I hate this friggin’ book.
There’s a part where Jude calls Lizzie a whore. There’s a part where Lizzie is talking about her Tragic Backstory with her ex – basically he was a controlling, manipulative, soon-to-be-abuser. She broke up with him and he shared naked pictures of her with everyone. Her dad did some victim blaming. When she tells the story to Ryan, he gushes about how she never let that douche get the best of her, because she’s so strong and amazing. And it’s clear from Lizzie’s reaction that she’s unhappy with his idolization, but he is just not picking up the signs. When Lizzie tells Jude the same story, she expands on it by sharing the fact that after all of that, she tried to kill herself. Jude gets it. Because of course he does.
Then the ending happens way too quickly for the amount of drama in this book.
WHAT THE ACTUAL HELL. WHAT BULLSHIT DID I JUST PUT MYSELF THROUGH?
So. *ahem* Not a fan. Nope. The melodrama dripping from the walls and a cast of characters I actively wish bad things on — it’s just a recipe for suck. In my opinion. F.
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Thanks!
There’s a YA book with a similar plotline and I lobster-hated that one. So I’ll be giving this one a WIDE miss.
Thanks for taking one for the team. And your review is great, even if the book was horrible!
Good Lord. Thank you for articulating so well all the issues with this book, and I’m so sorry you had to slog through it so the rest of us can avoid the horror.
Great review. Sorry for the painful experience of reading this wtf book. Also, I bonded with you FOR LIFE when you confessed your loathing for Cathy and Heathcliff.
I must be weird, because I’m quite unbothered by characters having sex with people other than their eventual partners. (I mean, unless it’s late in a romance where the partners have already agreed to exclusivity, at which point it would make me concerned for their viability as a couple.) In fact, I find the intense hatred for it that so many people express rather troubling and slut-shaming, especially since it tends to be directed a lot more strongly at female characters than male ones.
I sometimes get annoyed at the lengths authors will go to to keep their characters from having sex with other people in their books. Kristen Ashley, I am glaring so hard in your direction right now. If you set up a love triangle, you can’t then put the heroine in a million situations where she’d obviously sleep with the other guy and just make actual sex not happen because, I dunno, someone fell asleep too soon or whatever.
It’s always good to know what books are book and what aren’t. Thanks for the review!
@Althea Claire Duffy you’re not weird!! But I have to disagree, and side with Erica. I can’t stand it when main characters have sex with partners besides the hero or heroine–unless the point of the book is specifically multiple partnerships (menage, love triangle, poly community).
It’s not slut-shaming for me. In contemporaries I prefer heroines who have had healthy sex lives before the book’s narrative picks up; it’s a little trickier in historicals, but at least a heroine who’s confident and in control of her sexuality. The problem I have with heroes or heroines sleeping with other partners during the course of the book is that it’s impossible for me not to get invested in those relationships, as well–if they’re having sex, it should be healthy and fun, and so I naturally root for any sexual partnerships to be caring and fulfilling. As a reader, spending that emotional investment on other relationships almost always leaves me with conflicted feelings about the HEA of the main characters.
tl;dr: I like my happy endings like I like my cacao, fair trade and conflict-free. And I really liked this review. And I really hate Wuthering Heights.
I’m grossed out by having sex with one brother and then the other/Jake having sex with his brother’s ex. Brotherly similarities aren’t going to be creepy in the sack? Not going to be awkward taking about the ex and he realizes, “Oh, she’s talking about my brother”? Japan is so far away Ryan’s feelings don’t count, or is a permanent brotherly rift an acceptable consequence of birthday sex?
Boundaries, kids. There are whole lot of unrelated fish in the sea.
@myself: *talking
@Althea Claire Duffy. It’s not you; the genre has narrowed to cover a smaller section of the normal range.
By contrast, (if I remember Juliet Flesch’s book/thesis correctly), a quite common arc for a pre-war Mills and Boon romance was for the heroine to meet, and often marry, a “romantic false lead”, become disenchanted with him, meet another man – her true love, this time – and be conveniently freed, by death or divorce, to marry the true love.
It was still divorce without children, though. THAT’s where Cathy and Heathcliff failed to make me care about them, when they didn’t look after the kids who were in the picture.
@Rose – “I like my happy endings like I like my cacao, fair-trade and conflict-free” – hee, this is fantastic!
@Zyva – thanks for the history lesson! I often like longer books and more complex arcs, and even series with multi-book arcs, and I feel there’s a lot more room for secondary or false-start relationships in books like that too.
As for Wuthering Heights – there are some books where I love the characters and root for them, there are some books where the characters are uninteresting or unpleasant and I don’t care about them (or actively want to punch them), and there are some books where the characters are deeply flawed or outright jerks but they’re screwed up in a really fascinating way. Wuthering Heights falls into that third category for me. It satisfies some of the same instinct for me as following a really bizarre news story. Part intellectual fascination with the foibles of humanity, part pity and sometimes genuine sympathy with these messed-up people, part schadenfreude, and part rubbernecking in horrified fascination. I also love the prose and the atmosphere.
I don’t know anyone who thinks Heathcliff and Cathy are good people. I’ve only seen the Tom Hardy movie version, and in that one I almost was on Heathcliff’s side at the beginning, but then he turned into a complete dick.
This kind of romantic setup is just so hard to pull off. I don’t mind when the romantic leads sleep with other people as long as it’s in the early part of the book and no one is slut shamey or misogynistic about it. Cheating after the relationship has been established turns me off so there would have to be a really good reason for it/circumstance for me to “forgive” whichever character did it.
@Althea Claire Duffy. I gave Wuthering Heights as a gift before I’d read our my mother’s copy. To a biracial girl. I was expecting Heathcliff to be uplifting, sth like that. A hero, as advertised. I was mortified when I found out it’s car crash drama. Which is fine, but not what I was after.
The only question I have is how Lizzie did in that Shakespeare class she used Ryan for?
Also–“a recipe for suck”–I’m stealing that.
I really love it when the RITA reviews are different – the other reviewer gave this like a C – it’s so interesting to me to read the difference between one person’s meh and another’s flaming pile of crap.
I’m sorry – I’m confused. How do you really feel? 🙂
I thought perhaps they would decide to be a throuple. Maybe next time.
Enjoyed the review!!
I’m okay with hero/heroine sleeping with other people as long as it’s not cheating and if it’s more of a fade-to-black or we just know they’ve slept with someone else- I think sex scenes should be between main characters. Is that weird? But I don’t mind if they’ve slept with someone else before being an established couple.
This book however sounds like it has a whole host of other issues that would make it unpleasant to read.
@Sunshine – I don’t think that’s weird. Any sex scene should also serve the story/show us something about characterization. A romance novel I can think of off the top of my head that featured a sex scene between the heroine and someone else, before she meets the hero, served the purpose of showing us that she didn’t feel that passionate about this guy and also because her becoming pregnant as a result of that encounter was a plot point of the story.
Loved your review. Thanks for writing it and for the honesty!
One thing that both reviews of this book have made me think is “these characters are too adolescent.” Like, there is nothing adult about their behavior.
“New Adult” may mean “under 30” these days (which seems really problematic given that heroines over 30 are “older”!! What, we go straight from young adult to new adult to a few minutes of Prime Adult, and then Older? WTFF) but IMO it ought to mean Actual, if Inexperienced, Adult … and not arrested-development teenager in a 22-yr-old skin.
The thing about sex scenes with the hero/heroine sleeping with someone else is that it’s commmon to open up with the hero in bed with another woman or talking to former more experienced mistress. The genre (and fiction in general) takes it for granted the experienced woman gets the benefits of his sexual expertise, but is unsuitable for getting involved further since she is often too old, too experienced, not virginal, and possibly less likely to dump out a litter of kids. So she is no good and the hero needs the young sweet innocent virgin heroine.
I would prefer for neither of the leads to have a sex in the story, but if it’s not cheating it gets a pass from me.
Wow. Did we read the same book? I really enjoyed this one, and I related a lot to the heroine in that she was an immature college kid making tough choices between what she should want and what she actually wanted. (College was rough, y’all.) I thought the way the triangle played out was well done, and I am eagerly awaiting Ryan’s book. I guess everyone reads a different book through their own lens. I just hate to see this book get universally bashed here. If new adult or love triangles are your thing, give it a go.
Eh…how do these keep getting nominated? I understand a book not being everyone’s catnip but this book sounds like it flows like a backward river.
Loved the review!!
@ Colleen Thanks for speaking up with a dissenting opinion. It doesn’t sound like my cup of tea, but it’s good to know it worked for some readers! I’m always amazed at not only how different readers react to the same book, but how my own tastes and tolerances have changed over time. That lens makes all the difference!
Mine have changed a lot too over time. I’ve reread a lot of the books that brought me to the genre again as an adult and oh my god I can’t. I joined an online book club that has been pushing me to try new to me authors and subgenres and it’s been a great experience. I’ve become more open minded about what I’ll try and what I’ve found I like.
Oh dear! My book club is a bitch sometimes, so I feel for your sooo hard for having to read something you hate. But thanks for the warning! I wouldn’t mind sleeping with other people part, but when they are brothers… for me that is creepy.
LOVED this book. One of my favorites last year. It’s for readers who like beautifully written, nuanced characters. Sad that the reviews on here are punishing the book for being exactly what it says it is – a triangle with two brothers. And WOW did it do a triangle well. This was one of the best I’ve ever read–emotional, and handled so well. I was rooting for all the characters the whole way, because they are all trying to do the right thing, and trying to grow up in the process. Like @Colleen, I’m dying to read Ryan’s story.
@Megan M There is no cheating in this book. That’s what I loved–that she avoided that in a triangle. No one is out to hurt anyone else in this story.
@chacha1 Totally disagree with the reviews on here (Goodreads reviews are much better). It’s very New Adult. The characters are trying to make mature decisions in a very difficult situation.
This is one of my favorite New Adult books that I’ve read. I understand some people don’t like the love triangle trope (but then, why review such a book?), but it was beautifully done. I cared about every character, and it had me guessing until *nearly* the end on who Lizzie would end up with. It’s also one of the most beautifully written romance novels I’ve seen around. It’s reviews like this that make me question the trustworthiness of SBTB. But I just keep telling myself that all tastes are different…
@Alice: I am puzzled by your use of “trustworthiness.” Do you mean that you think our reviews are in some way dishonest, or that these two reviewers are not sharing their opinions honestly? Or do you mean that our opinions aren’t to be trusted because readers disagreed with you?
We do indeed have varying tastes but I’m startled by the idea that disagreement means we are therefore untrustworthy.
@SB Sarah. Correct me if I didn’t gather right, but wasn’t the book selection process for your RITA Challenge kind of potlucky? Like, only rarely did reviewers get their pick of the crop?
I imagine fans of genre-variant tropes like love triangles would hope you’d commission habitués who can compare like with like, grade on a scale, dunno. Complicated, given the sheer volume of books up for review, but hope springs eternal…or infernal, not practical.
@Zyva: The RITA Challenge has always been first come, first serve. People sign up for books they’d like to review, assuming a spot was open. I’m sure some reviewers were able to get their first choices, but I know several who really wanted to participate and just picked from whatever spots were available. That means that some readers selected books which weren’t necessarily in their wheelhouse, though I think in those cases, the reviewers have been good at noting, “Hey, this wasn’t for me because XYZ, but fans of XYZ might like it.”
Also, the goal of the RITA Challenge is to review all the books that are finalists for the RITA as a community of romance fans. It’s not to match prospective readers with finalist books that match their tastes – I don’t have that kind of power, nor that kind of time! Each review, as with any review, is that reader’s opinion, and in every respect, what doesn’t work for one person may work very well for another. Both opinions are valid.
@SB Sarah Agree with @Zyva and @Alice on this one. Your methodology seems really flawed on these Rita reviews. The other reviewer of this book literally started with … I hate love triangles. And this reviewer seems to hate the whole concept, too. Seems unfair to the writer and a disservice to the readers.
I can’t believe I am saying this again, but reviews are NOT for writers. They are for readers.
And the two reviews for this book are an ideal example of how reviews like this work: there are many readers who dislike love triangles (I am one of them, for example). So this review says to readers who dig love triangles: “AHOY. THIS BOOK IS YOUR JAM ON TOP OF YOUR CATNIP. GO GET IT.”
And it says to readers who dislike love triangles, “This book is not your thing.”
The point of a good review is not to tell you whether a book was good or not. No one is the last word on a book. A review explains why a person liked or disliked a book, which then allows you to make your own decision, and figure out if your tastes align with theirs.
Both of these reviews this well. Folks who dig love triangles can go buy it or borrow it, and folks who liked this book can offer their perspective on why they enjoyed it. No one was forced to read books they don’t enjoy. That would be a flawed methodology.
@SB Sarah: thanks for elaborating. I don’t want to scattily mislead people.
I wasn’t aiming to invalidate the methodolgy as it stands. It’s just that my castles in the air have ALL the turrets. Non cost-assessed. Including ones that aren’t really for me…
That is, I want to know whether a fictional love triangle will trigger me. (Minor key ptsd from being dragged as a tag along on divorced parents’ dates. Left to my own devices for hours, regular, once exposed to pda. GROSS. Now my heart bleeds for the person in a triangle who’s gooseberry.) Very likely I will get what I require from reviewers with reservations. But it’s not just about me.
@SB Sarah Thx for the response. Obviously they’re for readers, but a review is actually NOT one person’s opinion about whether they liked/disliked a book. It’s supposed to be a critical analysis and examination of a book. It’s cool if this site doesn’t do that. I just like my reviews smart and informed.
Smart Bitches, please seek out legitimate reviewers as much as possible. This reviewer is awful.
You’re seriously going to show up as a new commenter to insult a volunteer reviewer? Seriously? Good grief. Someone didn’t like a book you like. Get over it.