Please note that I received this book via NetGalley. This did not affect my rating or review.
I don’t even know what to say about this one. I saw that I am not an outlier though on Goodreads. I wanted to like this one, but I could not get into the main character (McKenna) at all. There’s a lot going on with this character and she doesn’t look the greatest through this whole book. It also didn’t help that once again we have people acting like if you have a career that means you can’t be happy without being in love and having kids. Please stop writing romance novels featuring career women who are adamant they don’t want kids who then go well now love has come to me so kids sound great. If I met the love of my life tomorrow, I am still not having kids. That’s okay. And honestly the flow of the book was all over the place. I think this takes place over 10 months to a year? I don’t know I lost track of the time shifts through the book. And lastly, Turner including that the hero (Henry) made a documentary about the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and how wonderful they are and blah blah blah kept making me laugh. Not in a good way.
“The Do-Over” follows McKenna Keaton, a lawyer at a prestigious law firm in New York. McKenna thinks that the senior partners at her firm are about to make her an offer, but when she is accused of embezzling funds, she is escorted out of the firm and doesn’t know what to do. Her younger sister’s engagement party is in a few weeks so she decides to return to North Carolina to see her family, but keeps to herself, outside of her older sister Erica and her husband Jared, what really went on in New York. Blah blah blah plot, she runs into a guy who was her “competition” in high school, Henry who has now become a world famous documentary director.
The book starts off with a summary of the Keaton family when McKenna, her parents, and her sister Erica all moved to New York so that McKenna’s mom could follow her dreams of being in a Broadway show. Things change for them though when McKenna’s mom gets pregnant with her sister Taylor. The family then moves to North Carolina which apparently was a fate worse than death. McKenna was focused though on being a lawyer and moving back to New York which she sees as her “home.” And maybe I could have bought any of that if we got any sense that Erica did anything besides going to work or had any friends. Seriously. McKenna had no friends outside of her sister Erica and her husband in this one. It was weird. And her blaming her sister Taylor and just being a jerk to her through most of the book was not an entertaining read.
I wish that I could have liked McKenna more, but her lying to mostly everyone and then deciding that she has to be with Henry but doesn’t get how love works made me exhausted. This woman is in her mid thirties, why she is portrayed as clueless about human emotions was baffling. And I hated how everyone kept giving her a pass on things. I guess I am a career woman, I own my own home, have no urge to ever give birth, and though I think it would occasionally be nice to have someone to cuddle with on a couch, I don’t go around cursing being single. I read a great article the other day about being black and single and it spoke to me so well. I have interests, hobbies, and great friends that are ride or die. Anyway, back to the book.
I just didn’t get McKenna because if you are going to have someone who stays away from her family/home for 3 years, have it be because she’s living a great life. And that was not the case at all. It was just so weird how this was written.
Henry. No. I don’t know what else to say besides that. I just felt like he was cheekbones, dimples, and teal eyes. Guess how many times his teal eyes are brought up? I still couldn’t tell you anything about him outside of that. Oh, I did think that teal would be a pretty color for my outdoor pillows this summer, so thank you Henry for that.
The other characters are not very well developed. There are hints here and there with Erica and Taylor, but Turner rushes through the moments too fast to just get to everyone’s alright. I was interested in their stories, and wish that they had been there besides giving McKenna advice (Erica) and being a thorn in her side (Taylor).
The writing was repetitive after a while. The overall plot (such as it was) gets lost and then found and then lost again. I don’t know if we were supposed to care about the embezzling or what, but it gets picked up and dropped throughout the book. I also don’t see or get how McKenna is such a great lawyer. We get zero scenes of her doing it and why she even loves it. The flow also needed some work. Probably because I was reading an ARC, the story felt choppy at times and a few times the words got broken in weird places so I think that’s why the flow didn’t’ work for me.
There is a HEA which is good for a romance. But I just wasn’t invested in it as I usually am when I am reading a can’t put down romance novel.
