F*ck No!

author: Sarah Knight

I’m familiar with Knight’s other No F*cks Given guides and have recommended a few to friends, particularly The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a F*ck. Based on the premise that boundaries are important, but setting them is half the battle and defending them with Honesty and Politeness (H&P) is the the other, each book in the series embraces the idea that you are in charge of your life, and you get to decide how it will be. They’re written with a fair amount of profanity (which I very much enjoy) and a definitive sense of character from the perspective of the person giving the advice. The writing isn’t meant to appeal broadly and blandly to every reader; this is a person who is Very Much Herself telling you what she thinks you need to know.

The latest in the series, F*ck No, builds on the same core foundation of the others but the specificity rests on addressing situations wherein one might want to say no, but feels like one cannot. There are four main reasons or character types that create the “I should have said no but I did not” repeated behavior, and a ton of scripts and sample templates for gracefully and thoroughly saying “No.”

I read this book in an afternoon and enjoyed it, but I’ve already cleared a few hurdles in my ability to say “no” to things I don’t want to do. However, when I texted a picture of the book to a friend of mine who has identified out loud that she has trouble with declining, she was so excited that my offer to let her borrow it when I was done was accepted (heh) with many, many exclamation points. So while this book might not appeal to you if you’ve already shed a solid number of the fucks that you may have given in the past, you may know someone who would love a book full of cursing, sarcasm, and irreverent but thorough advice on how to decline just about every situation, including being invited to family gatherings you don’t want to attend.

Essentially, everyone’s boundary of “no” is different, and the consequences for “no” vary widely according to the situation, the individual’s privilege, family and friend dynamics, and of course finances. But so many people are inculcated and pressured to never ever say no, and that pressure is pervasive and insidious. So a guide that says, essentially, “‘Yes’ to all the ‘No’ you want to say, and here are several variations in how you can say them,” may feel very reassuring, especially when setting of boundaries and maintaining them is absolutely essential.

– SB Sarah

Nonfiction

Mix Tape

author: Jane Sanderson

Trigger warning (for the book, not the review): There is a teen pregnancy in the book and the father and sister are trying very hard to make the girl have an abortion when she doesn’t want to. I don’t know how this resolves, because see the DNF grade. But if you have triggers around emotionally abusive families or around other people deciding your healthcare, proceed with caution.

I picked up this book because it looked like the perfect nostalgia read – mix tapes and growing up in Adelaide in the 80s, and music, and a second chance romance felt like a great mood. Unfortunately for me, Mix Tape turned out to be a perfectly well-written book that was absolutely not to my taste. (Also, it turns out that the Adelaide part was from the meeting-again plot, so it was actually about growing up in Sheffield in the 1970s – still a fine sort of nostalgia, but less precisely aimed at my own past!)

The nostalgia part really is good. Sanderson has a gift for setting, and there is a strong sense of place and time, and the characters feel very real (with the exception of the Australian slang, which is a bit on the nose. A bit too much ‘bonzer’ and ‘mad as a frog in a sock’ for my sense of realism.)

The second chance romance is more of a problem, mostly because the two main characters are married to other people at the start of the book, and in Dan’s case at least, happily so (matters are more mixed for Ali). I found the rapidity with which they fell into flirtation-by-Twitter-message a bit distasteful, and was especially troubled by how quickly Dan justified this emotional infidelity to himself:

He wondered, was this juvenile? This avid interest in a woman he’d only ever known as a girl? But then: Fuck it, he thought, life is a weird and wonderful thing, and this isn’t any old girl, it’s Alison Connor.

So I guess that makes it alright then.

And then Dan’s friend, Duncan, starts having an affair, and when Dan’s wife (who is close friends with Duncan’s wife) gets angry about it, Dan immediately starts off with ‘Have you bothered to consider why he may have had his head turned?’ because, you know, apparently sometimes Duncan’s wife has an ‘occasional flint-eyed froideur’ and a ‘tendency to slip into boardroom steeliness’.

And that, my friends, is when I closed the book. Dan is a self-indulgent man-child and I have no interest in finding out whether he gets a happy ending or not. Ali is lovely and probably needs to leave her husband way behind her, but she can do far better than Dan. I suspect this story works just fine as women’s fiction or literary fiction. But as a romance, it’s two thumbs down from me.

– Catherine Heloise

Contemporary Romance, Romance

Much Ado about a Widow

author: Jenna Jaxon

Content warning: Attempted rape

Much Ado About A Widow starts with Georgie, two years widowed, returning to her father’s house to marry a man she loathes on pain of being disowned. On the way, she is kidnapped by unsavoury persons; she escapes them only to collide with Robin, Lord St Just, a friend of her brother’s, who rescues her… by kidnapping her again, this time onto his boat. To do him justice, this is probably the safest place for Georgie if she doesn’t want to marry Travers, but this is the first of several decisions he will make against Georgie’s will for her own good, and I have to say, I didn’t love this pattern. It didn’t help that he initially failed to believe Georgie’s story. He did redeem himself with Georgie (and somewhat with me) by diving into an icy sea and nearly dying in order to rescue her dog, but while this made him more likeable, my curmudgeonly side felt that this was not a great advertisement for his intelligence. Having said that, after this point, the relationship between Rob and Georgie became sweet and flirtatious and charming, and I was happily shipping them.

What really ruined the book for me, however, was just how terrible Georgie’s family was. Even her brother Jemmie, who was supposedly her ally, defaulted to assuming that Georgie was lying and that Rob was a villain at the drop of a hat, and once he decided to support their courtship, he was very old school about protecting her virtue – despite the fact that she was a widow and that, as his wife pointed out more than once, the two of them had enthusiastically and repeatedly anticipated their own vows. He also went on a tear about Rob stealing Georgie’s virtue, and his first act on catching up with the two of them was to punch Rob in the nose. Ah, the sweet, sweet smell of toxic masculinity!
But Jemmie was actually the good relative. Georgie’s father was absolutely set on Georgie marrying the cartoonishly horrible Travers, even after Travers attempted to rape Georgie, and even after Georgie had an offer from the far more eligible Rob. Her father’s attempts at coercion extended to sending people to kidnap Georgie back from Rob (which really ought to have been farcical – three kidnappings in one book? – but was not) and threatening to have her locked up in Bedlam if she refused to marry Travers. Lovely. Given his utter intransigence right up until the final chapters of the book, I found the ending hard to swallow.

I entered this book looking for a fun Regency-set historical, with kidnappings, pirates, threats of forced marriage and maybe a smuggler or two. Alas, I found it just a bit Old Skool, and definitely far too generously endowed with terrible people who had too much power over the heroine. As a result, I spent most of the book in a state of dread, which is not what I want from a romance novel. This is a D minus for me.

– Catherine Heloise

Historical: European, Romance