C+
Genre: Contemporary Romance, Romance
Theme: Fake Relationship
Archetype: Diverse Protagonists, Doctor/Nurse/Veterinarian
I found Like Lovers Do, which is the second book in the Girls’ Trip series, to be frustrating. I like the focus on friendship and work/life balance in this series, but wow, did this book make me want to plead, “GET SOME THERAPY!” I admired many things about the characters but their inability to manage relationships made me want to scream, as did the evil ex-girlfriend character.
This series is about a group of Black friends, all of whom are high-achieving professionals in their respective fields. This book focuses on one of these women, Dr. Nicole Allen (Nic). Nic is about to finish a residency in orthopedic surgery. She was raised by a single mom who sacrificed all her own ambitions to support a husband who then skipped out on the family when Nic was a child. Nic has no interest in romance, believing that a serious romantic relationship would inevitably force her to make the same choices as her mom.
At the start of the book, Nic has rented a basement apartment from Ben for three years and they have become close friends. Ben was born to extremely wealthy parents who devoted their lives to their careers and ignored him. His dream is to marry someone who will make family life a priority and will center their lives around their children. He intentionally keeps his own business small so that his work doesn’t eclipse his life, ignoring the option of hiring more people to let the business expand without eating up all his time.
So, basically, both people think there is only one possible outcome of romance: love a man and you will have to give up your career, and love a woman who is into her career and you have to give up family. This conflict could have been compelling if it were based in real conversations about what quality parenting and work/life balance might look like to each of them. Instead they just run around repeating refrains of, “I hate love because of my parents” and “Oh yeah, well, I hate doctors because of MY parents.” It was frustrating to see such a potentially compelling and important conflict reduced to assumptions based on unresolved childhood issues.
Anyway, it turns out that Ben has an obnoxious ex named Tinsley who is crashing a gathering of Ben’s friends at Martha’s Vineyard. Nic agrees to be Ben’s pretend girlfriend. It takes about five seconds for them to start making out because of mutual pants feelings and they realize that their friendship has been love along, but after spending three years of friendship with nary an argument, they are now arguing about whether they can have a long term relationship.
You might like this book if you like:
- Vicariously living the dream (luxury and scenery on Martha’s Vineyard)
- Fake dating tropes
- Found family
- Friends-to-lovers tropes
This book unfortunately contains one of my LEAST favorite tropes, that of the conniving, manipulative, hostile ex-girlfriend, and does nothing to flesh out the character. Tinsley is incredibly over-the-top in her attempts to manipulate Ben and insult Nic, and her motive never makes sense –Tinsley is rich, blonde, beautiful and thin (also, we are told, “polished”), so I’m pretty sure there are fish in the sea for her other than Ben. There’s no nuance with her character or behavior. No one likes her or wants her around, and because she doesn’t express any sadness about that, there’s no room for the reader to feel sorry for Tinsley. She has no personality beyond wanting Ben and hating Nic and being a racist snob. She’s a caricature evil ex.
This has been an odd review to write because the longer I worked on it the angrier I got. Work/Life/Parenting balance is HARD, people. It’s hard if you choose to have one parent stay home. It’s hard if both parents work long hours with high career ambitions. Maybe I’m extra touchy about this because during the pandemic, it seems to me to be next to impossible: I have one teen and I’m a work-from-home parent and I’m pulling out my hair, and how much more difficult has this been for everyone else? But even in a pandemic-free world, there are no right answers to what a family should look like and there aren’t any easy answers either. If two people are ambitious about their careers, and want to have kids, then they will have some tough conversations ahead. I don’t mean to suggest that ambitious, career-focused people can’t be good parents, because of course they can. I’m just saying that the struggle, as they say, is real because children are time consuming (ask me how I know).
So to have the conflict boiled down to Nic deciding that ANY serious romantic relationship would inevitably be the end of her career solely because that’s the choice her mother made was really frustrating. And to have that same conflict boiled down to Ben presuming that parents with demanding jobs can’t be good parents because his parents were garbage people is just as infuriating. It’s a raw nerve for me right now, and in general.
This book is very descriptive: the dreamy vacations are dreamy, the sex is hot, and many of the issues that are present deserve exploration. However, Tinsley is never humanized, and the main conflict becomes contrived by taking a serious issue that could be worked through with intention, and reduces it to an emotional mess between two people who recite the conflict without any nuance behind their convictions. I wanted both of them to find some therapy to help them past those issues. I enjoyed a lot of the book (mainly, the parts in which Ben and Nic just hung out without drama). However, the evil-ex trope and the mis-handling of the conflict was a bummer that left me feeling frustrated at the end of the story.
This book is available from:
As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.
We also may use affiliate links in our posts, as well.
Thanks!
An ancillary trope (tropette?) to the nuance-free horrible, scheming ex is when a woman (not the heroine), in her professional capacity, is shown doing complete unprofessional things because she has insta-lust for the hero. I’ve DNF’d more than one book where the hero & heroine (usually very early in their relationship) are together somewhere (a restaurant, a doctor’s office, a plane) and the waitress, doctor/nurse, flight attendant ignores the heroine to make goo-goo eyes at the hero. It’s as if the writer can’t figure out another way to make us see the hero as attractive than to show women (who are working in a professional capacity at a paying job) forget their jobs and turn into vampy caricatures. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again—I want books that give me reasons to like the heroines, not just reasons to dislike the women around them.
The bitchy ex girlfriend is a trope that refuses to die (the trope not the girlfriend).
What is wrong with a story having a ex in it but they broke up because they just weren’t compatible?
And while we’re at it, can we get rid of the ex boyfriend who is overweight and useless in bed trope too?
It would be one thing if the horrible ex-girlfriends felt like real people. Women can be psychologically/emotionally abusive just as men can, and if we saw actually realistic depictions of the aftermath of relationships like that, AND if there were more depictions of perfectly normal no-fault exes, it wouldn’t bother me nearly as much. Instead we always seem to get these psychos who are composed of all the worst misogynistic stereotypes rather than being horrible in one of the various ways real women can be horrible.
The other thing too is that narcissists, in particular, are often extremely good at making their partners look nuts so that everyone will side with them, think they’re a saint for putting up with this “crazy” person, &c. My first boyfriend was a master at pushing my buttons in public so that I’d freak out, but no one else would notice what he was doing. Many of these people (not my ex) eventually dump their victim for fresh meat, and the victim is left looking like the villain, because basically their abuser spent the entire relationship setting them up for the role and then ended it with an explosion of cheating and gaslighting and general horror. To the extent that some of these “hysterical” “crazy” women exist, it’s often actually because the abuser is pulling the strings, and the “crazy” behaviour makes perfect sense in that context… but of course the abuser is going to play all innocent and describe all incidents without any context so that she just looks “nuts.” Many psycho exes we get in romance novels sort of resemble this sort of thing when really, they should be resembling the abusers!, which they typically don’t.
So… there’s also that. Especially when the hero in this story is the domineering pushy type, idk, one wonders.
I loved this one. While I can’t really refute the issues Carrie raised, I loved Ben and Nic and their friendship-to-love relationship. I wanted this book to be about 50 pages longer, even though it already clocks in at almost 400 pages.
@Star This 1000% !! Every time I come across the “crazy ex gf” all I can think of is my ex, having systematically isolated me from my family and friends and having moved to a new city for work, pushing my buttons so that I seemed unhinged to all the people around him… just a great way for him to blame all of his troubles on his mentally unstable girlfriend.
I read this and rated it 3-stars. For my part, I agree the bigger issue is the romantic conflict. And I thought that Ben felt more emotionally available and ready for something more serious than Nic did. She seemed to dismiss it out of hand.
The ex-girlfriend stuff didn’t bother me that much. She just didn’t loom very large for me as a presence at all. Yeah, she was annoying etc. But she was a minor annoyance, imo.
So far in this series I think the author does workplace issues quite well. This was no different. I thought the subplot of Nic’s fellowship possibly being in jeopardy because of her (rightful) reprimand of a subordinate who just happened to be a well-connected white male was well done. Especially Nic’s unspoken, but spot on, frustrated thoughts toward her boss in the end.
I hate the evil ex trope. Especially when they are depicted as being shallow beautiful women who are so unlike the female love interest. You can be friends with your exes, hell even go to their weddings and be happy for them. It’s a lazy attempt to create drama and go with the whole “only this one magic vagina is the one for me, how stupid I was to fall for that conniving woman” thing. Relationships don’t always work out, we all know that, no need to make the ex into a villain.