Book Review

Making Up by Lucy Parker

This is what I would call a quiet sort of romance. I loved the hero and heroine, and I loved the layers of repair and reevaluation that go on during the course of the story. There is not a lot of massive, tumultuous tension between them, but there is a lot to undo and restore.

Trix Lane is an aerialist starring in a theatre production (think Cirque du Soleil) trying to piece her life and her confidence back together. On the same evening – Parker does great opening scenes that tell the reader who everyone is and what the stakes are, with added humor – the lead of the show falls and breaks her arm, her close friend and co-star is so upset by the injury he throws up on himself and her, and when she goes backstage, she learns her enemy from school, Leo Magasiva, has been hired to do makeup for the production. It’s not an ideal way to end a performance.

Leo and Trix immediately snipe at each other with a familiarity that indicates a lot of shared history and a lot of angry hurt buried in that history. Their mutual snarls seem almost like habit, especially since they can target each other’s weak spots so precisely. Then Leo finds Trix at a vulnerable moment, and finds himself living in company housing in her shared flat with two other dudes, and their relationship starts to change.

The title, Making Up, refers to more than just Trix and Leo. They go from snarling ire to hot attraction very quickly, but that journey wasn’t difficult to believe. Intense dislike is caused by intensity, and shifting that intensity into attraction and ardor isn’t tough, especially when there was already some foundation to that shift in their past.

The harder work is the repair, the correction of misunderstandings, and thankfully that was handled early. Each of their lives featured difficult and painful changes in direction, in part due to one another and to their own immaturity. These are two people who, when they knew each other in school, weren’t mature enough to fully handle the potential of their relationship nor ready for each other romantically until much later. Once they satisfy their present day pants feelings, the real work begins. They have to make up past hurts and rectify past misconceptions, and figure out how their lives might fit together now. Their journeys mirror one another in emotionally subtle ways, too.

Trix is negotiating her own shaken self confidence while trying to keep the starring role she’s unexpectedly landed after the lead’s injury and the understudy’s departure. Leo is trying to figure out how to restart his career as a makeup and special effects artist after an actor had an allergic reaction after failing to disclose said allergy and blamed Leo, with pictures to go with the accusation. Leo is also wondering why his sister is back in London after a year of fashion design school in New York, and why she’s so angry and so unpleasant to everyone, including him.

One of the themes in all of Parker’s books, not just this one, is the tension and disconnect between the public faces and public personae of the different characters – all of whom are celebrities in different ways – and their personal realities, the real reasons and causes for their quirks and habits. It’s very common for one character to assume another is acting they way they are because of an obvious “publicly known” reason, and eventually they discover they’re almost always wrong. The tension between public and private lives is present in this book as well, with the fan shipping of Trix and a co-star creating issues for all of them.

The most wrenching and resonant part of this story is the aftereffects of abuse, not just for Trix, who was in an abusive relationship which was featured a bit in Pretty Face, but for other characters as well. Both Trix and Leo have had difficult childhoods – Trix was raised in foster care, and Leo’s parents left him and his sister at a young age. Trix’s abusive ex left her with serious doubts in herself, not just in her confidence in her art and in her personality, but in her own judgment now that she has some distance and hindsight: how could she have stayed with with someone so toxic, so cruel, so mean? And because her ex had tried to come between Trix and Lily, the heroine of Pretty Face, Trix is also repairing her friendship with Lily, and feels tremendous guilt for what happened.

The aftereffects of abuse and manipulation inform much of what Trix does and says, and serve to make her job much more difficult: as an aerialist, she has to trust her body without reservation, trust her abilities without a moment of doubt, or she could fall and be badly hurt – as she witnessed when the lead fell onto a prop and broke her arm. The barriers to Trix’s trust in herself impede her performance and  her chances of making the starring role permanent, and interfere with the potential for a real and meaningful relationship with Magasiva – but the clean up after an abusive partner takes a very long time. Some of the tension of the story rests on Trix’s very real fears that she can’t do now what she used to be able to do so easily, because she’s been too hurt and damaged by her ex.

Watching Trix repair her relationships with Leo, with Lily, and with herself, is the best part of the story. The emotional stakes aren’t so much located in their relationship with each other, but in their relationships with themselves, especially for Trix. Leo’s story isn’t as deeply nuanced and complex as Trix’s, mostly because Trix has more emotional ground to cover, and I missed the more balanced focus on both hero and heroine, though I understand why that was the case in this book.

CW: The emotional abuse doesn’t take place on the page, so to speak, but Trix thinks about it frequently, as does another character, and it’s a theme that connects all the characters. If that would be upsetting for you to read, it may be better to skip this one.

I adore this series, and re-read and re-listen to Act Like It and Pretty Face constantly when I want a pick-me-up. Because of the wrenching emotional resonance in this story, it might be a little while before I go back to it, but I’m certain that I will. The ways in which Leo and Trix learn to communicate and care for one another, and the little pieces of shared history between them are wonderfully revealed and so poignant. This romance has a rather simple physical beginning and a challenging emotional finish, and it has left a very real imprint on me after I read the last page.

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Making Up by Lucy Parker

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  1. Katty says:

    I was so happy when I saw this morning that my preorder of this book had arrived! I sense a Bad Decisions Book Club in my near future!
    I have to say, I enjoyed Act Like It (even though I usually prefer historicals), but I adored Pretty Face, especially the audio book. In fact, I think the actual adoration started with the audio book. Sarah, you say you listen to and read both regularly, what is your take on the audio vs book versions?

  2. DonnaMarie says:

    @Katty, holiday weekends are made for the BDSC. I on the other hand will have towait until the budget allows the purchase of a new Kindle. Sigh. I really want to read this NOW.

    Thanks for the review Sarah!

  3. Katty says:

    @DonnaMarie: Which holiday? Is it a holiday weekend in the US? (Not that my 3-year-old would care anyway… ;-))

  4. Mags says:

    @Katty, yes, today is Memorial Day in the US.

  5. MaryK says:

    “I adore this series, and re-read and re-listen to Act Like It and Pretty Face constantly when I want a pick-me-up.”

    I do too! IMO, Act Like It is practically perfect.

  6. Anony Miss says:

    Am eager to read this one!! Enjoyed my last Parker on your recommendation.

    Didn’t see anything in the review to explain why a B+ grade though?

  7. Monique says:

    They bickered for the first 33% of the book! I couldn’t stand it anymore! I adored Pretty Face but this one? No, just no. Thanks for your review. Still love you!

  8. Kareni says:

    I’m looking forward to reading this. Thanks for the review, Sarah.

  9. Theresa says:

    I read this last night – I’ve been waiting for it forever and when it showed up on my kindle and, given Monday was a holiday, I just stayed up late and read it.

    While I enjoyed the book, Making Up was nowhere near as special as the first two books in the series. I read those two frequently and really loved the characters. I couldn’t wait to read more about Trix but just felt like she didn’t get to develop a lot. Also, a lot of Leo and Trix’s early relationship is from their past and more time than I would like was spent on that. I did like the book but it didn’t have the special quality the first two books had.

  10. Caroline says:

    I really loved the unusual careers of the characters and way this was fleshed out. “Act Like It” is still my favorite of the series, but I would definitely recommend this one.

  11. Janine says:

    It turns out that Lucy Parker is really good at picking tropes that are either my romance catnip or anti-catnip. “Act Like It” combined great writing with some of my favorite romance staples–slow-burn romance! banter! imperfect heroes! fiesty heroines!–so it is no surprise that it has become one of my Kindle perennials. “Pretty Face,” though–I have never been a fan of big age gaps in romance, and I really, really don’t care for workplace romances with a power differential–so even though that conflict was thoughtfully and carefully written, it was Not For Me. So I was very excited for “Making Up” only to realize that it’s a sequel (not a fave–I prefer the Act Like It-Pretty Face connection where the characters share the same universe but not a close relationship) and also involves a hero and heroine who have a long off-screen history together. I hate jumping into the middle of a story. So the TLDR of this review is that as always, the writing is excellent and the setting is fascinating, but the tropes make it hard for me to judge it objectively. If you already love Lucy Parker’s books, it’s worth trying, though!

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