Book Review

Guest Review: Her Hometown Girl by Lorelie Brown

NB: This guest review is from Reader Tara Scott. If you want to read her previous guest reviews (and we highly recommend that you do), you can see them all here.

Tara reads a lot of lesbian romances. You can catch her regularly reviewing at The Lesbian Review and Curve Magazine and hear her talk about lesbian fiction (including romance) on her podcast Les Do Books. You can also hit her up for recommendations on Twitter (@taramdscott).

Trigger Warnings for this book for abuse, rape, and domestic abuse and violence.

I’ve been a fan of Lorelie Brown for a long time, so you can imagine how surprised and delighted I was last year when I heard she was putting out a romance with two female leads. And I wasn’t disappointed! Far From Home ( A | BN | K | AB ) blew me away and ended up being one of my favourite books of 2016. It stood out not only because it’s a marriage of convenience story (of which there aren’t many in lesbian romance), but also because it’s told in the first person perspective of a woman who lives with anorexia. I got even more excited this year when I saw she was releasing a runaway bride romance, and much like Far From Home, Her Hometown Girl ended up being so much more than I’d expected.

The book opens with Tansy Gavin sitting in a tattoo chair, miserable and on the verge of tears. Instead of celebrating the wedding she was supposed to have had that day, she’s getting a tattoo that her controlling ex, Jody, would hate. It’s Tansy’s first step towards independence in years, hastily made after catching Jody banging a dude from the catering staff that morning. Her tattoo artist, Cai, is kind and gentle as she listens non-judgmentally to her story, and when Tansy comes back for touch-ups six weeks later, she doesn’t hesitate when Cai asks her on a date.

Cai has her own baggage that leaves her reluctant to open up to anyone or get involved in a relationship, but when she’s around Tansy, it just feels different than her previous encounters. Tansy isn’t ready for anything serious anyway, and Cai is more than happy to be the rebound for the much younger woman, even if she’s aware that she needs to be careful with Tansy:

Campsite rules and all that. I’m older than her. If I’m willing to do this with Tansy, I have to be able to leave her better off than I found her. That seems easier said than done when I’m pretty much a hot mess at any given time.

As Tansy heals from her last relationship and begins to figure out what she wants her life to look like, she starts to feel the call to go see her family in Idaho. For reasons even Tansy doesn’t totally understand, she invites Cai to come along, making their no-strings-attached arrangement feel a little more real than either woman would have expected.

Her Hometown Girl is told in the first person, shifting between Cai and Tansy’s perspectives. This lets us quickly realize exactly how fucked up Tansy’s relationship with Jody was and its lasting effects on her because we see how intentionally gentle and careful Cai is with Tansy, and how Tansy responds very differently than someone would if they weren’t carrying the same trauma. Lorelie Brown made a brave choice to tackle abuse in same sex relationships, because it’s especially rare in romance stories between two women and yet it’s a problem that needs to get talked about.

Even with abuse as an important part of the story, Her Hometown Girl is often fun in parts and is incredibly sweet. Cai and Tansy have a lovely chemistry that makes it easy to see why they’re attracted to each other even with their respective emotional issues. My favourite moments were the ones like this, where we see how cute they are together as well as the emotional upheaval that underpins so much of Tansy’s thought processes:

I lift my hand and slowly turn my palm to the sky. The bird on my wrist travels with me until it’s standing in my palm. There’s a shaft of sunshine over both of us. I really am Sleeping Beauty or something. If only I could sing. “This is so fun.”

“I’m glad.” Cai’s hair slides like silk from her shoulder to cascade down her chest. Her neat, pleat-front shirt catches black strands. “It’d really suck if I brought you here and then it turned out you were afraid of birds.”

“Who’s afraid of birbs?” I coo at the green friend standing on my hand. “Birbs are adorabubbles. Tumblr says so.”

“Meme addict.”

“Only the good ones.”

I like the way she looks at me. I can’t put my finger on what it is, but it makes me feel . . . appreciated. Wow. That’s such a sad state of affairs. I crave being appreciated. That’s not something that I should have been missing considering I was hours away from being married.

Next time. I’m not screwing it up next time. I’ll pick someone who looks at me the way Cai looks at me.

The sex is also worth noting because it’s hot as hell and has some light kink that works really well. The sex and their kink shifts as their connection deepens, and it’s a nice complement to the relationship building as they each grow to trust each other more and more.

Her Hometown Girl is beautiful, sexy and occasionally gut wrenching. I wholeheartedly recommend it and am giving it an A- because of its difficult subject matter, not despite it. That the author managed to make it funny, sweet and hot while addressing abuse is impressive, and I hope that this book will give queer women in abusive relationships with other women the courage to seek help. It’s why I rooted for Tansy and Cai both as individuals and as a couple, and hoped very bad things would happen to Jody.

The story had my attention from the first page to the last, and I even found myself reading the last chapter ever so slowly because I didn’t want it to end. It may be the third book in the Belladonna Ink series, but it truly stands alone, and this could be a great place to start if you’ve never read Lorelie Brown before.

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Her Hometown Girl by Lorelie Brown

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  1. Pamala says:

    First, I’m a big Lorelie Brown fan so will definitely get this. Next, that cover is awesome, right? Thanks for the review 🙂

  2. Vasha says:

    Important note: This book needs a lot of trigger warnings. There’s descriptions all through of the ways that Tansy was abused, and on-page depiction of rape. I’m not easily disturbed, and yet I found it hard at times. You have been warned.

    I wasn’t nearly as impressed as Tara with this book. It’s only 250 pages long, and yet it has to fit in both Tansy’s recovery from major trauma, and the progression of a love affair from first meeting to HEA. The story takes place over a year but the telling is very compressed, with lots of narrative description of character traits and emotional developments that I’d have preferred to have come out naturally, depicted in details and interactions. Plus, in a book this length, all the heavy, heavy stuff about abuse winds up overshadowing the sweet, light moments, and although there’s an attempt to balance the two, I don’t think it quite works.

    Tansy was really charming; the author managed to make her cute without being cutesy, with a personal sense of style and an unusual mind. Her recovery is satisfying and it’s a pleasure to watch her interact with her family. The depiction of how she just fits in her small hometown is convincing.

    I wish I could say that Cai was an equally compelling character. But she felt seriously underdeveloped to me. We are told about her backstory, her bad experience as a teenager that has hung over the rest of her life, her reluctance to commit, the fact that she loves adventure and risk, the fact that (even though she’s 39) she’s never felt about anyone before the way she does about Tansy. But it’s all tell. I didn’t get a sense of her life: there’s been a lot of it, clearly, but she doesn’t interact with any friends in this book, there aren’t any stories about her past relationships, there aren’t a whole lot of details about her other than general “caretaker butch” traits. So, that means the romance isn’t really there. Without two well-developed characters, you don’t know why these two people belong together. They do have great sex, I admit. But the rest of their interactions weren’t enough for the HEA to be convincing.

    (On a side note, Cai is Asian-American and you’d think that might figure into her dilemma of whether to move to a tiny rural town with Tansy, where there’s probably about three Asians in the whole county, but it isn’t mentioned. Does she have any Asian friends in California? Who knows?)

    So, there needed to be more to the book. Another hundred pages to slow down the pace, and more care taken in depicting Cai to make her personality come out more.

  3. SB Sarah says:

    @Vasha: Thank you for the alert – I’ll amend accordingly.

  4. Critterbee says:

    That sounds like a really good book. And a great review. Would love to follow Tara’s reviews on goodreads, if she is on there?

  5. cleo says:

    I read and enjoyed the 2nd book in this series – it’s much lighter than the rest of the series (probably why I haven’t read the rest of the series).

    Want to put in a plug for Take Me Home – book 2 in this series. It’s a Thanksgiving themed novella so it’s a good one to read right now. The set up is great. Young woman dreading the holiday answers online dating profile of a woman offering to a be your inappropriate gay date for Thanksgiving. Hijinks ensue. I enjoyed it – I wanted a little more character development and I thought a couple of the annoying relatives were just cardboard characters but it was good, fluffy fun.

  6. Tara Scott says:

    @Critterbee you can find me on Goodreads here: https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/5695212-tara

    I cross-post all of my reviews from here, Curve, and The Lesbian Review there!

  7. Robin says:

    I read Far from Home and found the ending trying too rushed for the drama/character development/resolution to be fit in. I think the stories would be better if the editor let her have some more page count or maybe lowered the drama to a lowercase d and then there would be less to work her way out of.

  8. Riley says:

    One thing I’m wondering – Jody cheating with a man specifically stood out to me, because that kind of thing is frequently a… breeding ground, maybe? common outlet? for both overt and unconscious negative stereotypes of bi women and bi people in general. It’s not always – every group of people will have a certain number of people in it who cheat, etc. – but it’s so common that while I want to read this book, as a bi woman I’m reluctant to do so unless I can be SURE I’m not going to turn a page and get gut-punched by biphobia. Can anyone help me out a bit, since several of you have read the book? Is it worth giving it a shot, or should I pass?

  9. Vasha says:

    @Riley: I’m trying to remember the details, from reading it over a month ago… But I think the cover blurb misrepresents things (apart from the serious mistake of trying to make this book sound like a light comedy, I mean!) I think maybe Tansy may have made some remarks about being startled that the person Jody was screwing before her wedding was a man, but only in the heat of the moment. By contrast, if I recall rightly, at Cai and Tansy’s first meeting, Cai suggested (seriously or not?) that she (Cai) was bisexual, and when Tansy didn’t have a negative reaction to that, Cai counted it as a point in Tansy’s favor.

    Biphobia really bugs me too. With one of the previous books Tara recommended (Her Best Friend’s Sister) this was one of the reasons I set it aside in the second chapter. Also don’t read The Belle and the BDOC; the level of biphobia and the level of “prove you’re really a lesbian because you act too straight!” are terrible in that one.

    Augh. Women just should not be policing whether other women are “lesbian enough.” I mean, I am old enough to understand the deep paranoia that living in a universally hostile society fosters, and the urge to huddle together in a group and constantly check that the others are really in and really committed, but that is nonetheless just messed up.

  10. cleo says:

    @Vasha – how interesting, I didn’t get that from The Belle and the BDOC at all, and I’m bi.

    Thinking about it (it’s been awhile since I read it) I can see what you mean about the whole “prove you’re really a lesbian” thing. For me, that felt in keeping with the protags being young and it being set in the 90s. But I can see why that’d bother you.

  11. SonomaLass says:

    I’ve been a Lorelei Brown fan since her debut novel. I’d encourage readers to check out her earlier books, too. She could certainly use the support — she recently broke both arms in a car accident, so her writing output is likely to slow down while she recovers.

  12. Riley says:

    @Vasha – Thanks so much, that’s super helpful and exactly the kind of thing I wanted to know! I’ll keep that in mind wrt the other books too, but it’ll be nice to read this one without spending the whole book bracing for that kind of thing. (And if I do decide to read the other ones, I’ll KNOW beforehand, which makes it less upsetting.)

  13. Tara Scott says:

    @Riley apologies for not seeing this sooner. My take on it was that Tansy was shocked because Jody is a lesbian (the blurb for the book calls them both lesbians too). I’m also bi (and actually, so is Lorelie Brown) and it didn’t strike me as a biphobic thing as much as another example of what an asshole Jody is, especially because of how she tried to say it was Tansy’s fault.

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