This RITA® Reader Challenge 2017 review was written by Catherine Heloise. This story was nominated for the RITA® in the Short Contemporary Romance category.

Here is Catherine Heloise's review:

I chose this book to review because I read a couple of Madeline Ash’s books earlier this year, as preparation for meeting her at a ‘Romance Author Speed Dating’ session. Fortunately, I genuinely liked her books (note for those who plan to read books by unknown authors in order to avoid social awkwardness in such situations: this can actually lead to bonus extra awkwardness if you don’t like the books – beware!). So I was definitely up for supporting an Aussie author by reading and reviewing one of her books for this challenge!

Breaking Good is the fourth book in Ash’s Rags to Riches series, and features Stevie and Ethan.

The story starts with a long, sweet prologue. We see that Stevie and Ethan have been friends since childhood. Stevie is a tomboy who plays soccer, doesn’t wear skirts, and can beat the boys at wrestling. Ethan has undiagnosed ADHD and while he’s clearly smart, he can’t concentrate or focus on anything, and is about to drop out of school. It’s clear that they like each other as well as being deeply attracted to each other; it’s also clear that they would not work as a couple – Stevie wants to go to Uni and become an engineer, and Ethan is just trying to figure out a way to live with the inside of his head that isn’t totally destructive to himself and those around him.

They know they aren’t going to see each other again, but they want just one night together before Ethan leaves. And they are using protection. What could possibly go wrong?

This is a romance novel. You know what went wrong.

The story picks up ten years later. Stevie never became an engineer – she got pregnant, dropped out of Uni to have the baby, and became a house painter. She didn’t contact Ethan when she found out that she was pregnant, because he had run away to Sydney and was doing all sorts of self-destructive things that she didn’t want her child exposed to – and she never got the chance to change her mind, because Ethan died of a drug overdose shortly after Zach was born. Stevie mourned Ethan’s death, but accepted that he wouldn’t have been good father material to Zach – and Zach really is the most important thing in her life.

But this is a romance novel, and it’s not a paranormal romance novel, so Ethan is definitely not dead – quite the contrary. He is just as hyperactive as ever, but has managed to channel his relentless energy into something constructive and has done quite well in a bunch of different businesses (with the help of a PA whose job is to make sure Ethan doesn’t forget to go to meetings or miss planes because he is distracted by something). He is looking for someone to paint his house when he is renovating, recognises Stevie, and thinks it might be nice to see her again. So he hires her.

Things do not go the way he planned.

This takes you to the end of Chapter 2, and that’s all the plot twists that the reader is going to get (though, clearly, both Ethan and Zach have plot twists in their future). But in fact, no other plot twists are needed. The story isn’t about an abundance of plot, it’s about everyone coping with the abundance of plot that happened before the book began. It’s about Stevie coming to terms with Ethan being alive and what that means; with Ethan coming to terms with the idea that he has a son; with Zach coming to terms with the idea that he has a father; and with the three of them trying to find the most constructive way to make this relationship work. And really, that’s quite enough conflict for one book.

I liked Stevie’s ambivalence about letting Ethan into Zach’s life – she wants him there, and believes he has a right to be there, but she is also afraid of losing what she has with Zach. She has been his entire life for so long, and he has been hers.

I also liked the fact that the three of them each have to figure out two sets of relationships – does being a parent to Zach make Ethan a partner to Stevie and vice versa? And if not, what kind of relationship do they need to have to make the parent-child relationships work? And who actually gets a vote in each of these relationships?

But as well as figuring out parenthood and whether they have a relationship or not, both Stevie and Ethan are working on self-acceptance. Ethan has learned to work around the way his brain functions, but he doesn’t like it, and he believes that he can never have a relationship because of it. Stevie, for her part, is not conventionally feminine and dresses in a fairly masculine style, and as a result, a lot of people have opinions about her sexuality which they feel free to share with her. She has learned to see herself as ‘different’ because of the way she presents, and that this is very much part of her identity, though there is in fact no question about her sexuality in her own mind – she is straight, cis-gendered, and entirely comfortable with being female. But she isn’t a “girly” sort of girl.

“I mean, the word tomboy”, she went on. Her finger still dug into his ribs, but Ethan didn’t care. “Honestly. Boys don’t own the qualities that make a girl a tomboy. Are those girls supposed to think that their own gender is so inferior that they want to dis-identify with being a girl entirely? What the hell?”

Captivated, he didn’t answer.

“And Tom is a boy’s name. So essentially, we’re double male. It could at least be a tomgirl, or, I don’t know, pollyboy, or something. But even that’s placing certain qualities into the boy box, when I’m clearly a girl, and so liking sport and science are therefore unisex qualities. Tomboy shouldn’t even exist as a term.”

Ethan collected her hand from his side. Stroking his thumb over her knuckles, he said, “I love your brain.”

She spun to face him, brows still lowered. “And I love yours. Never believe otherwise.”

And then we have Zach, Stevie and Ethan’s ten-year-old son. I’m never quite sure what makes a child in a book into a plot-moppet, but I don’t think this is it. Zach is necessary to the plot, of course, but he struck me as a convincing character in his own right – clever, cheeky, a bit of a rules-lawyer, and with a kind of fundamental selfishness that comes from having always been the centre of someone’s existence. I thought his evolving responses to Ethan made sense, though some of his changes in attitude seemed to happen pretty fast. Then again, everything in this book happens pretty fast, so I think it works?

Breaking Good is a very sweet book. Madeline Ash is good at writing characters who are really doing their best to be decent, kind people, in situations where this is challenging. There isn’t a lot of character transformation in this story, because there doesn’t need to be – it’s more about figuring out how to fit three lives together where there used to be two. And figuring out whether those lives belong together in the first place.

Also, I feel like I should mention that the end of the book made me weepy (not in a sad way, just because it was super sweet). Do take that with a grain of salt, though, because everything is making me cry this week, so this might not be the super-objective measure of romance novel excellence that it normally would be. But the book definitely does pack an emotional punch.