Class awareness: Something Kate does well (as does Ava Wilder!) is avoid shying away from the realities of class. In this book, we see Sam struggling, which isn't novel - the struggling female heroine has almost become a hallmark of the genre, but what felt sharply unique to me was that Nick was also not idealized. He's no billionaire male lead, nor a creative genius - he's just unapologetically middle class. Were you also struck by this choice and how subversive it feels?
Yes! I think the idea that “everyone is deserving of love” is what draws so many of us to romance, but you don’t always see that played out where the “everyone” is a manager at Chili’s. I felt like the class elements made this much more real, almost bordering on literary romance, which in turn made me realize how much typical romance, even if it’s contemporary/set in “reality”, is its own kind of fantasy.
Not class awareness specifically, but related to the lack of idealization of Nick. There are frequent references to Nick's Dad Bod, and specifically describing him as: “a character actor from the golden age of Hollywood.” It's such a specific and unique description that challenges these blandly gorgeous leading men of romances.
I didn't think it was subversive when I read it, but I get your point. He doesn't feel like a victim. Let's have more working-class rep in commercial fiction, please. It's also interesting that his backstory includes a creative/adjacent profession, though. He rationally sacrificed work he loved for his kid -- does this make him a better match for thwarted creative Sam?
I am curious about why it hits different here, rather than, say, Annabel Monaghan's Nora who lives paycheck to paycheck, presented as the fault of her big-spending/non-earning ex. Oh, but she has a dreamy (though fixer upper) house in a cute town.
Unlikeable characters: Kate Goldbeck often traffics in self proclaimed "unlikeable" characters (see the dedication for this book!), which is just another way of saying that her heroines, especially, are painfully human as opposed to just per formatively flawed. How did you feel about Sam? Were you frustrated by her at times or empathetic? How did her lack of perfection affect how you felt about her desire to be loved? Did you ever find Nick equally lacking?
I was fully empathetic as having lived a very similar situation career-wise at her age. For those of us who wanted to work in academia then opted out when we realized how it entirely dictated your lifestyle, this line left a deep mark on me: “I could keep chasing this one, elusive career path and force the rest of my life to revolve around that. Or I could build a life where people I love are at the center.”
I also was empathetic to Sam's only daughter, overachiever energy, and I think this is one of the best representations of the burnout and disillusionment that can result from that that I have seen.
This is such a good question! As someone who’s felt adrift at times, I related to Sam. I also think that if Nick and Sam had not both been flawed, I wouldn’t have rooted for them. For example, if Nick had been an ideal “book boyfriend” with washboard abs and endless patience, I would have been pulled from the story. It would be so unrealistic for someone like Sam to end up with him. But their flaws both meshed with each other. They’re both adrift from their creative aspirations in their own way. Nick is a Star Trek nerd, Sam is into comics, etc.
An aside: congrats Rena! So happy for you. Glad you’re getting to see some light at the end of such a dark time.
I have to admit that I didn't know that before I dove in and the only thing that kept me going past the first chapter was that you'd recommended it and were doing it for this book club so I kept going--I too find that professional inertia runs counter to my own personal taste and wasn't sure what would make me change my mind enough about the character to root for her. But... I did. But only starting in Chapt 3 when she starts playing with Kira. And then it came more together for me when she explains why/how she's gotten professionally stuck in Chapt 4 (and also that she does actually have a job.) BUT, I did wonder why this seemed to be done so deliberately? Like what was the benefit? It's interesting when it's the love interest and your mind as a reader changes with the protagonist's, but it was curious to me as the main character. Also, what I was most thinking about is if this would work for a debut novelist--if you only have 10 pages to query your work, it's not that your character can't have flaws but can you afford a character with a red flag characteristic? (Unless your writing is hilarious and so sparkly etc etc, and even then?)
also just to add, the book really came together for me when I realized the cleverness of the daddy issues theme--that not only was Nick a single father, but that him as a father made Sam reexamine how she thought about her own father, as a dad, and in her relationship with him. Especially this passage in Chapt 23 "Not that I believed my dad to be a paragon of fatherhood. But every time I have a conversation with Nick about single parenting, I feel like my memories get distorted. Like I'm playing them back through a lens that gives them a grittier aethetic."
This is such a good quote to pick out! I was worried with the title and the theme that their relationship would be an unhealthy one. I think what made it so heartwarming is that Nick doesn’t do the cliche thing and get a power trip off being a kind of pseudo father figure to Sam and do the thing her mom warned her about just haunt her be a convenient fit into his preexisting life. Instead, he really encourages her to be her own person. They’re partners, not people in a dominant/submissive relationship.
And can we talk about the chaotic cover? It didn't help - gives the impression that it is smut (which often has photo covers). I would never have picked it up to read. But I saw another cover like that the other day - I guess it's a new smart romance design.
The playing with Kira was the definition of "Save the Cat." If you lead with your character's flaws, they have to do something to make you sympathize... like saving a cat stuck in a tree.
Hal: Sam’s unfulfilling situationship with Hal seems to represent a commentary on modern dating in some ways. Do you think the relationship was a reflection of Sam’s own inertia, her lack of self esteem or just an example of how that generation engages in romance?
I’m the same age demographic as Sam. I admit to dating more than one “Hal” in my time. Some of the things he did and said struck me on a cellular level. Loved all the possibilities you listed about why she’s dating him. To me, Hal felt like a great encapsulation of the experience of dating someone you “should” want to date. On paper, Hal seems to be like who Sam shoud want to date (equally creative, educated, same age, etc). In the modern dating world, there’s a lot of pressure to be the “cool, casual girl” so as to not scare off a potential partner. Hal is Sam’s attempt at doing what’s expected of her. Nick represents her daring to go after someone that she herself wants.
I’m also around Sam’s age and have been through some similar situations, haha. I think in some romance novels when an ex or current “wrong” relationship is present that person is often cartoonishly awful or just a plot device to show how much the protagonist has suffered, and I liked that Hal gets a little bit more than that at the end (though he does kind of hilariously suck still lol). Kate Goldbeck goes for nuance as always!
The generational take on this is interesting. I dated in the 1980s and trust me, there were lots of situationships where the guy considered it friends with benefits and the gal worked very hard to see it as more. But Sam is lonely, has few friends, and is holding on to her self-esteem with two shredded fingernails -- and he's not terrible. The desire to have a place to go away from her suboptimal living situation is also in play. The "cool girl" comments below are interesting. Definitely a factor.
Comic Book Element: This was a surprisingly well developed sub plot point, with Kate using the description of panels to offer a different vantage point into the story at times as well as using Sam's feelings towards comics as a way to represent her relationship with her absent father. Did you find this device enhanced the story? *Sidenote: this reminded me in some ways of the essay/column elements from Kate Hash's debut.
It absolutely enhanced the story for me as a comic book fan - in a way, it literally is "showing" rather than "telling" (though still through prose - so cheeky) as Sam is describing these comic panels as a way to express her feelings differently.
Yes! I loved the comic book motif. It made it more fun to be in her head and was more unique than quoting social media posts or texts with friends. It was a hint she had the potential to be an artist again. The art aspect of her life was kind of a miscommunication plot point though. She was told once she didn't have her own style and then she immediately rejected art as a possible career... I feel like that's simplistic. But it may help understand why she got dug in about keeping her second-choice career at all costs.
I really appreciated Goldbeck's way with metaphor, she created these highly specific and unique metaphors that did a lot of work, such as:
“The Bixby is Gate 27 at the airport: everyone’s waiting for their next destination. And I’m that person at Gate 27 who’s camped out on the airport terminal floor, using her carry-on as a pillow. Number seventeen on the standby list. Stuck killing time in a bland, liminal space.”
And:
“...like a Ouija board, moving a planchette slowly from quadrant to quadrant, both of us subtly pushing and pulling it to validate our own truths.”
They create such a vivid picture while also telling us a lot about Sam the character.
I also appreciate how Goldbeck's love for the romance genre and its tropes clearly shows, while she also toys with and inverts some of those tropes. For example, Sam notes:
“Hands are my favorite part of the body. Eyes are the window into the soul, but hands contain a lot of information, too. And I don’t mean in the reflexology sense. We explore our immediate world with our hands. Sometimes we explore people with our hands.”
Eyes are such a cliche, so I love this shift of focus to another body part that also reveals a lot about Sam's character. Goldbeck also describes the first kiss between the MCs in such a fresh and non-cringe way that even some of my favorite authors can’t achieve.
Finally, I just have to comment on how much I loved the droll humor in this book - I was literally laughing out loud. At the end of the book, where Sam does the gag with her dad showing up, but then is like psych! - hilarious!
Thanks for choosing another compelling read, Rena, and congrats on this amazing life event!
So happy for you Rena! I love that you created this space as a way to navigate through loss, and are coming out on the other side having built something amazing! I’m noodling on that essay idea too…
I'm excited for you! Wishing for a year of busy happiness. I'll be on the road all day but I want to discuss Daddy Issues so will get into the comments tonight or tomorrow. X
First off, congratulations! Couldn’t be more thrilled that a mini-Rena may be entering the world soon!
Second, this post prompted me to pull Daddy Issues off my shelf and put it in the pile to take on a trip next week — I can’t wait to revisit this after my trip!
Ending: the book, to me, felt as much about Sam's personal journey as it did about her romance with Nick. Did you find the ending satisfying on both fronts?
Responding to this one myself - I thought Kate managed to deliver on the HEA promise of the genre while embracing nuance in other areas of the storyline, which felt very deft. I was particularly intrigued by the acknowledgment of the gap that sometimes exists between work that is meaningful and ideally suited to our interests and work that may be necessary to pay the bills. In a genre that is often billed as wish fulfillment or escapism, this felt like a daring (and rich) choice.
I also agree! I empathized with this book a lot as someone who aspired to work in a creative field. I worked at two different magazines doing creative work with people I admired. But I learned the hard way that the shininess of the publications and the respect I had for my colleagues couldn’t make up for the cut-throat environment and the terrible systemic treatment. Am much happier (and getting paid more) spending days writing for engineers. Like that this novel presented an alternative to the standard, platonic ideal of a dream ending.
I couldn't agree more! The fact that Nick has neither the money nor the cultural credentials that Hal has was one of the things I loved best about the book. Like Sam, I had a flaky father - one whose absence loomed persistently in the background. As a result, I find responsibility, capability, and emotional presence to be extremely sexy qualities! I cheered when Sam shut Hal down as he scoffed at Nick's job towards the end. I applauded her realization that she wanted to build a life around the people that she loves rather than a job. I think it's one of the reasons this HEA was so satisfying to me - it didn't feel like it was just about the MMC. I feel optimistic about Sam and Nick's chances. Even more than that, though, in letting go of the idea of a "dream job" and embracing her art and the people who love her well, I feel like Sam has figured out the key to living a happy life!
I felt this book had an absolutely necessary third-act break-up that was needed because of their age gap and her own daddy issues. She needed to move out of her mom's and take that job and figure a things out for herself before she was ready, and he knew that.
Thanks as always Rena for your thoughtful curation. You're expanding my horizons. I used 32 Days in May as an example for a MFA friend the other day as she was wondering about what you fictionalize and what you keep when setting fiction in a real location.
This is such a great pick for book club because there are so many things to talk about. I do agree that this book takes risks and feels rooted in realness from Kate’s experiences while also obviously creating this fictional world and characters. This book has a lot of “in-world” friction built into the relationship between Sam and Nick as the cousin, step-parent, and forums all present very convincing reasons why they shouldn’t be together. Combined with my personal friction with this type of age-gap relationship (I have crossed the age rubicon where I can only judge the men for not dating women their own age), it was a challenging read at times, but overall in an interesting, compelling way.
Things I liked:
—book team listed by name on title page—yes to all the support to make a beautiful, well crafted book! Interesting design, unique flourishes, and well edited (with one minor critique below)
—This book really shined for me in the conversation set pieces (Nick and his daughter in the pool, when the mom tells Sam she is getting kicked out, Nick and Sam when she’s talking about Hal and he thinks she is talking about her Dad, Perry and Sam’s step-parent convo late in the book, Sam and Hal in New York).
—I liked that there was a mostly realistic other man that wasn’t evil, they just weren’t good for each other and didn’t break up because they thought life was about to do it for them. Same with Nick’s ex-wife
—The things with her father find a quiet, sort of resolution instead of a direct confrontation.
—Sam gets her communication issues from her Mom, and it’s shown instead of told.
—Sam’s unreliability as a narrator made the super voice-y, single pov work better for me, even if I struggled with it at the beginning
—the post book meta-commentary! I always find it so interesting to know about the story behind the book.
Things I struggled with:
—for a book called Daddy Issues, I felt like Sam’s relationship with her father was hammered too strongly in the beginning and could have been revealed over the course of the story to be more effective and subtle. I wondered if it editing they added in more explicit statements as they felt the readers wouldn’t get it?
—I honestly found Nick to be both needing more of an arc and also needing to be more hesitant of their relationship. While I really appreciated the ex-wife and his relationship is portrayed as amicable, I wanted to know what he was doing differently to be ready for a relationship. Hooking up with a super drunk younger neighbor struggling with confidence, telling her about his glory days where he was essentially the millennial version of Hal, telling her he loved her super fast, it all made me doubt his maturity and readiness for an actual relationship.
Interesting, I didn't read him telling her about his past as retelling his "glory days" or emulating a millennial version of Hal because the work he did was so different (technical labor versus creative work), and he clearly took pleasure in doing it competently, instead I read it as him expressing to Sam his own fumbles at her age and showing that he wasn't always the dependable person he is now. However, I would have liked to see a little more of an arc for him, too, rather than his arc seeming to only be in the past.
I agree that it was great character work for showing Nick had this adventurous past and showing the trade-off he's made to support his daughter and be "a grown-up" and how he still doesn't have all the answers. He has all this physical competency that Sam is drawn to, from his past to fixing things at Chili's to building bookcases, and it was a fun reveal of his adjacent-to-glamour youth. The part that struck me, however, was when he said:
"When I was in my twenties, I wasn't the best guy, you know?There are a handful of women out there in the world who would have some awful things to say about me. And they'd be justified. Believe it or not, you're getting the improved version of me...maybe not physically."
And on one hand, this level of self-awareness has the appeal of a guy who has "done the work" and, of course, you get some of his self-deprecating humor at the end. However, I found this to be pretty off-putting in terms of what "awful" things had he done to many women? Ghosting? Leading them on? Something worse? I think I just needed more reassurance that he was actually ready for a relationship and not just rebounding and I was missing the parts where he was actively working on being a better partner or explicitly doing things differently than before.
That makes sense! I think his lack of arc too and the implication of having done the work in the past sidesteps that character development for him, so he can be there to just be a dependable guy for Sam, but that bit of his past does the work of making him more dimensional than he actually is in the present narrative.
Class awareness: Something Kate does well (as does Ava Wilder!) is avoid shying away from the realities of class. In this book, we see Sam struggling, which isn't novel - the struggling female heroine has almost become a hallmark of the genre, but what felt sharply unique to me was that Nick was also not idealized. He's no billionaire male lead, nor a creative genius - he's just unapologetically middle class. Were you also struck by this choice and how subversive it feels?
Yes! I think the idea that “everyone is deserving of love” is what draws so many of us to romance, but you don’t always see that played out where the “everyone” is a manager at Chili’s. I felt like the class elements made this much more real, almost bordering on literary romance, which in turn made me realize how much typical romance, even if it’s contemporary/set in “reality”, is its own kind of fantasy.
Not class awareness specifically, but related to the lack of idealization of Nick. There are frequent references to Nick's Dad Bod, and specifically describing him as: “a character actor from the golden age of Hollywood.” It's such a specific and unique description that challenges these blandly gorgeous leading men of romances.
I didn't think it was subversive when I read it, but I get your point. He doesn't feel like a victim. Let's have more working-class rep in commercial fiction, please. It's also interesting that his backstory includes a creative/adjacent profession, though. He rationally sacrificed work he loved for his kid -- does this make him a better match for thwarted creative Sam?
I am curious about why it hits different here, rather than, say, Annabel Monaghan's Nora who lives paycheck to paycheck, presented as the fault of her big-spending/non-earning ex. Oh, but she has a dreamy (though fixer upper) house in a cute town.
Unlikeable characters: Kate Goldbeck often traffics in self proclaimed "unlikeable" characters (see the dedication for this book!), which is just another way of saying that her heroines, especially, are painfully human as opposed to just per formatively flawed. How did you feel about Sam? Were you frustrated by her at times or empathetic? How did her lack of perfection affect how you felt about her desire to be loved? Did you ever find Nick equally lacking?
I was fully empathetic as having lived a very similar situation career-wise at her age. For those of us who wanted to work in academia then opted out when we realized how it entirely dictated your lifestyle, this line left a deep mark on me: “I could keep chasing this one, elusive career path and force the rest of my life to revolve around that. Or I could build a life where people I love are at the center.”
I also was empathetic to Sam's only daughter, overachiever energy, and I think this is one of the best representations of the burnout and disillusionment that can result from that that I have seen.
This is such a good question! As someone who’s felt adrift at times, I related to Sam. I also think that if Nick and Sam had not both been flawed, I wouldn’t have rooted for them. For example, if Nick had been an ideal “book boyfriend” with washboard abs and endless patience, I would have been pulled from the story. It would be so unrealistic for someone like Sam to end up with him. But their flaws both meshed with each other. They’re both adrift from their creative aspirations in their own way. Nick is a Star Trek nerd, Sam is into comics, etc.
An aside: congrats Rena! So happy for you. Glad you’re getting to see some light at the end of such a dark time.
I have to admit that I didn't know that before I dove in and the only thing that kept me going past the first chapter was that you'd recommended it and were doing it for this book club so I kept going--I too find that professional inertia runs counter to my own personal taste and wasn't sure what would make me change my mind enough about the character to root for her. But... I did. But only starting in Chapt 3 when she starts playing with Kira. And then it came more together for me when she explains why/how she's gotten professionally stuck in Chapt 4 (and also that she does actually have a job.) BUT, I did wonder why this seemed to be done so deliberately? Like what was the benefit? It's interesting when it's the love interest and your mind as a reader changes with the protagonist's, but it was curious to me as the main character. Also, what I was most thinking about is if this would work for a debut novelist--if you only have 10 pages to query your work, it's not that your character can't have flaws but can you afford a character with a red flag characteristic? (Unless your writing is hilarious and so sparkly etc etc, and even then?)
also just to add, the book really came together for me when I realized the cleverness of the daddy issues theme--that not only was Nick a single father, but that him as a father made Sam reexamine how she thought about her own father, as a dad, and in her relationship with him. Especially this passage in Chapt 23 "Not that I believed my dad to be a paragon of fatherhood. But every time I have a conversation with Nick about single parenting, I feel like my memories get distorted. Like I'm playing them back through a lens that gives them a grittier aethetic."
This is such a good quote to pick out! I was worried with the title and the theme that their relationship would be an unhealthy one. I think what made it so heartwarming is that Nick doesn’t do the cliche thing and get a power trip off being a kind of pseudo father figure to Sam and do the thing her mom warned her about just haunt her be a convenient fit into his preexisting life. Instead, he really encourages her to be her own person. They’re partners, not people in a dominant/submissive relationship.
And can we talk about the chaotic cover? It didn't help - gives the impression that it is smut (which often has photo covers). I would never have picked it up to read. But I saw another cover like that the other day - I guess it's a new smart romance design.
The playing with Kira was the definition of "Save the Cat." If you lead with your character's flaws, they have to do something to make you sympathize... like saving a cat stuck in a tree.
Agree! But I was surprised we had to wait until chapter 3, rather than say the end of chapter 1…
Hal: Sam’s unfulfilling situationship with Hal seems to represent a commentary on modern dating in some ways. Do you think the relationship was a reflection of Sam’s own inertia, her lack of self esteem or just an example of how that generation engages in romance?
I’m the same age demographic as Sam. I admit to dating more than one “Hal” in my time. Some of the things he did and said struck me on a cellular level. Loved all the possibilities you listed about why she’s dating him. To me, Hal felt like a great encapsulation of the experience of dating someone you “should” want to date. On paper, Hal seems to be like who Sam shoud want to date (equally creative, educated, same age, etc). In the modern dating world, there’s a lot of pressure to be the “cool, casual girl” so as to not scare off a potential partner. Hal is Sam’s attempt at doing what’s expected of her. Nick represents her daring to go after someone that she herself wants.
I’m also around Sam’s age and have been through some similar situations, haha. I think in some romance novels when an ex or current “wrong” relationship is present that person is often cartoonishly awful or just a plot device to show how much the protagonist has suffered, and I liked that Hal gets a little bit more than that at the end (though he does kind of hilariously suck still lol). Kate Goldbeck goes for nuance as always!
The generational take on this is interesting. I dated in the 1980s and trust me, there were lots of situationships where the guy considered it friends with benefits and the gal worked very hard to see it as more. But Sam is lonely, has few friends, and is holding on to her self-esteem with two shredded fingernails -- and he's not terrible. The desire to have a place to go away from her suboptimal living situation is also in play. The "cool girl" comments below are interesting. Definitely a factor.
Comic Book Element: This was a surprisingly well developed sub plot point, with Kate using the description of panels to offer a different vantage point into the story at times as well as using Sam's feelings towards comics as a way to represent her relationship with her absent father. Did you find this device enhanced the story? *Sidenote: this reminded me in some ways of the essay/column elements from Kate Hash's debut.
It absolutely enhanced the story for me as a comic book fan - in a way, it literally is "showing" rather than "telling" (though still through prose - so cheeky) as Sam is describing these comic panels as a way to express her feelings differently.
This is one of the few things I did like about this book!
Yes! I loved the comic book motif. It made it more fun to be in her head and was more unique than quoting social media posts or texts with friends. It was a hint she had the potential to be an artist again. The art aspect of her life was kind of a miscommunication plot point though. She was told once she didn't have her own style and then she immediately rejected art as a possible career... I feel like that's simplistic. But it may help understand why she got dug in about keeping her second-choice career at all costs.
I really appreciated Goldbeck's way with metaphor, she created these highly specific and unique metaphors that did a lot of work, such as:
“The Bixby is Gate 27 at the airport: everyone’s waiting for their next destination. And I’m that person at Gate 27 who’s camped out on the airport terminal floor, using her carry-on as a pillow. Number seventeen on the standby list. Stuck killing time in a bland, liminal space.”
And:
“...like a Ouija board, moving a planchette slowly from quadrant to quadrant, both of us subtly pushing and pulling it to validate our own truths.”
They create such a vivid picture while also telling us a lot about Sam the character.
I also appreciate how Goldbeck's love for the romance genre and its tropes clearly shows, while she also toys with and inverts some of those tropes. For example, Sam notes:
“Hands are my favorite part of the body. Eyes are the window into the soul, but hands contain a lot of information, too. And I don’t mean in the reflexology sense. We explore our immediate world with our hands. Sometimes we explore people with our hands.”
Eyes are such a cliche, so I love this shift of focus to another body part that also reveals a lot about Sam's character. Goldbeck also describes the first kiss between the MCs in such a fresh and non-cringe way that even some of my favorite authors can’t achieve.
Finally, I just have to comment on how much I loved the droll humor in this book - I was literally laughing out loud. At the end of the book, where Sam does the gag with her dad showing up, but then is like psych! - hilarious!
Thanks for choosing another compelling read, Rena, and congrats on this amazing life event!
So happy for you Rena! I love that you created this space as a way to navigate through loss, and are coming out on the other side having built something amazing! I’m noodling on that essay idea too…
I'm excited for you! Wishing for a year of busy happiness. I'll be on the road all day but I want to discuss Daddy Issues so will get into the comments tonight or tomorrow. X
Congratulations! I'm so happy for you and wish you all the best.
First off, congratulations! Couldn’t be more thrilled that a mini-Rena may be entering the world soon!
Second, this post prompted me to pull Daddy Issues off my shelf and put it in the pile to take on a trip next week — I can’t wait to revisit this after my trip!
Congratulations! Wishing you the best!
Ending: the book, to me, felt as much about Sam's personal journey as it did about her romance with Nick. Did you find the ending satisfying on both fronts?
Responding to this one myself - I thought Kate managed to deliver on the HEA promise of the genre while embracing nuance in other areas of the storyline, which felt very deft. I was particularly intrigued by the acknowledgment of the gap that sometimes exists between work that is meaningful and ideally suited to our interests and work that may be necessary to pay the bills. In a genre that is often billed as wish fulfillment or escapism, this felt like a daring (and rich) choice.
I also agree! I empathized with this book a lot as someone who aspired to work in a creative field. I worked at two different magazines doing creative work with people I admired. But I learned the hard way that the shininess of the publications and the respect I had for my colleagues couldn’t make up for the cut-throat environment and the terrible systemic treatment. Am much happier (and getting paid more) spending days writing for engineers. Like that this novel presented an alternative to the standard, platonic ideal of a dream ending.
I couldn't agree more! The fact that Nick has neither the money nor the cultural credentials that Hal has was one of the things I loved best about the book. Like Sam, I had a flaky father - one whose absence loomed persistently in the background. As a result, I find responsibility, capability, and emotional presence to be extremely sexy qualities! I cheered when Sam shut Hal down as he scoffed at Nick's job towards the end. I applauded her realization that she wanted to build a life around the people that she loves rather than a job. I think it's one of the reasons this HEA was so satisfying to me - it didn't feel like it was just about the MMC. I feel optimistic about Sam and Nick's chances. Even more than that, though, in letting go of the idea of a "dream job" and embracing her art and the people who love her well, I feel like Sam has figured out the key to living a happy life!
I felt this book had an absolutely necessary third-act break-up that was needed because of their age gap and her own daddy issues. She needed to move out of her mom's and take that job and figure a things out for herself before she was ready, and he knew that.
Just catching up here - huge congratulations Rena!
Thanks as always Rena for your thoughtful curation. You're expanding my horizons. I used 32 Days in May as an example for a MFA friend the other day as she was wondering about what you fictionalize and what you keep when setting fiction in a real location.
Congrats, Rena!
This is such a great pick for book club because there are so many things to talk about. I do agree that this book takes risks and feels rooted in realness from Kate’s experiences while also obviously creating this fictional world and characters. This book has a lot of “in-world” friction built into the relationship between Sam and Nick as the cousin, step-parent, and forums all present very convincing reasons why they shouldn’t be together. Combined with my personal friction with this type of age-gap relationship (I have crossed the age rubicon where I can only judge the men for not dating women their own age), it was a challenging read at times, but overall in an interesting, compelling way.
Things I liked:
—book team listed by name on title page—yes to all the support to make a beautiful, well crafted book! Interesting design, unique flourishes, and well edited (with one minor critique below)
—This book really shined for me in the conversation set pieces (Nick and his daughter in the pool, when the mom tells Sam she is getting kicked out, Nick and Sam when she’s talking about Hal and he thinks she is talking about her Dad, Perry and Sam’s step-parent convo late in the book, Sam and Hal in New York).
—I liked that there was a mostly realistic other man that wasn’t evil, they just weren’t good for each other and didn’t break up because they thought life was about to do it for them. Same with Nick’s ex-wife
—The things with her father find a quiet, sort of resolution instead of a direct confrontation.
—Sam gets her communication issues from her Mom, and it’s shown instead of told.
—Sam’s unreliability as a narrator made the super voice-y, single pov work better for me, even if I struggled with it at the beginning
—the post book meta-commentary! I always find it so interesting to know about the story behind the book.
Things I struggled with:
—for a book called Daddy Issues, I felt like Sam’s relationship with her father was hammered too strongly in the beginning and could have been revealed over the course of the story to be more effective and subtle. I wondered if it editing they added in more explicit statements as they felt the readers wouldn’t get it?
—I honestly found Nick to be both needing more of an arc and also needing to be more hesitant of their relationship. While I really appreciated the ex-wife and his relationship is portrayed as amicable, I wanted to know what he was doing differently to be ready for a relationship. Hooking up with a super drunk younger neighbor struggling with confidence, telling her about his glory days where he was essentially the millennial version of Hal, telling her he loved her super fast, it all made me doubt his maturity and readiness for an actual relationship.
Interesting, I didn't read him telling her about his past as retelling his "glory days" or emulating a millennial version of Hal because the work he did was so different (technical labor versus creative work), and he clearly took pleasure in doing it competently, instead I read it as him expressing to Sam his own fumbles at her age and showing that he wasn't always the dependable person he is now. However, I would have liked to see a little more of an arc for him, too, rather than his arc seeming to only be in the past.
I agree that it was great character work for showing Nick had this adventurous past and showing the trade-off he's made to support his daughter and be "a grown-up" and how he still doesn't have all the answers. He has all this physical competency that Sam is drawn to, from his past to fixing things at Chili's to building bookcases, and it was a fun reveal of his adjacent-to-glamour youth. The part that struck me, however, was when he said:
"When I was in my twenties, I wasn't the best guy, you know?There are a handful of women out there in the world who would have some awful things to say about me. And they'd be justified. Believe it or not, you're getting the improved version of me...maybe not physically."
And on one hand, this level of self-awareness has the appeal of a guy who has "done the work" and, of course, you get some of his self-deprecating humor at the end. However, I found this to be pretty off-putting in terms of what "awful" things had he done to many women? Ghosting? Leading them on? Something worse? I think I just needed more reassurance that he was actually ready for a relationship and not just rebounding and I was missing the parts where he was actively working on being a better partner or explicitly doing things differently than before.
That makes sense! I think his lack of arc too and the implication of having done the work in the past sidesteps that character development for him, so he can be there to just be a dependable guy for Sam, but that bit of his past does the work of making him more dimensional than he actually is in the present narrative.
Agree the title was cringe even after you understood the meaning.
I didn't find it cringe as in keeping with the gallows and irreverent humor of Sam's perspective.
Congrats Rena!! Sending all my love to you and your family, what an exciting time!! 🩷
Huge congratulations! Wishing you all the best. ❤️