The Sweetest September

by Liz Talley

August 1, 2014 · Harlequin Superromance

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This RITA® Reader Challenge 2015 review was written by KnitterJacqui. This story was nominated for the RITA® in the Long Contemporary category.

Here is KnitterJacqui's review:

There isn’t a lot I didn’t like about this book.  I’ve read a few of Liz Talley’s books before and her voice and style generally work well for me. Her characters seem human, she has an ear for dialogue and the issues facing the protagonists seem realistic and serious, but not too angsty or over the top.  The Harlequin Superromance format and length also provides high enough word count to let the author really explore the development of the characters and the relationship. I generally like this better than the shorter category formats.

The book uses a number of tried-and-true tropes – the biggest being the accidental pregnancy that is the catalyst for getting the hero (John) and heroine (Shelby – an unfortunate name, in my view) together. Somehow, though, these tropes don’t seem stale or clichéd in the author’s hands.

The pregnancy is the result of a drunken hook-up in a bathroom and the sex is described as not particularly good.  This description, which occurs in the first chapter, was already a point in the book’s favour, to my mind, since I tend to be sceptical of drunken hook-ups in which the earth moves and the heavens sing. The characters regret the fact that they turned to each other out of loneliness. John feels guilty because it is the anniversary of his wife’s death.  The whole incident is presented as realistically sordid. Even so, the pregnancy is a result of condom failure, not unprotected sex, and neither of the drunk protagonists drives themselves home.

Shelby is a strong heroine. She is not looking to John to take care of her or her unborn baby, although he ultimately wants to. She is more than capable of supporting herself as a high school math teacher and has family money to boot. There is something overly pat, perhaps, about the fact that a job seems to fall into her lap, but this is romancelandia so I went with it. John is a great hero – he doesn’t talk too much, but is obviously a sensitive man. He is clearly wrestling with some lingering grief and guilt at wanting and needing to move on, but he genuinely likes Shelby and appreciates aspects of her character that make her different from his wife. He makes mistakes while he’s feeling his way into a relationship with Shelby but his ineptness is endearing and creates opportunity for some good grovelling.

Another point in the book’s favour is that the characters behave like adults and for the most part, they talk to each other, except for one big misunderstanding at the end.  Even after they decide to spend some time together getting to know each other in order to make some decisions about how to incorporate a child into their future lives, the pregnancy doesn’t magically cure their issues. Shelby doesn’t hesitate to state her terms for moving the relationship to a deeper level with John, for example, and this requires him to move forward from the grief of losing his wife before she will agree to any future physical intimacy. Although the sexual chemistry between the couple is hot, this chemistry is not presented as a proxy for deeper feelings or as the “cure-all” for the emotional issues that the characters need to work out in order to be together.

Finally, I was relieved that the author chose not to villify John’s dead wife. There are few things that can make me close a book faster than a story about a widowed character whose dead spouse was somehow inferior to the new love interest, leaving the widowed character is free to move on because of this fact. In this story, much of the emotional tension comes from the fact that John and his wife had a good marriage (though not a perfect one) and that John is still experiencing deep and real grief at her loss, despite feeling as if he needs to move forward.

I had a few quibbles. There were moments where John’s grieving mother-in-law seemed a little too much like a caricatured villain of the piece. But the author came back from that brink, to my mind, by acknowledging the emotional effects of grieving the loss of a child and portraying the mother-in-law as clinically depressed and perplexed by her own actions. Also, (minor spoiler alert)

The book contains some obvious sequel bait, but it wasn’t too obtrusive. In fact, it made me want to go out and buy the other books to read the other characters’ stories, which I promptly did.

Overall, this was a nice, engrossing book with some emotional depth and a few flaws.