A romance that involves the legal profession and doesn’t make me want to gouge my eyes out (note that there are still some liberties being taken but on the whole it’s actually reasonably consistent with how legal practice can happen)! It’s a Liftmass miracle!
Plot: Beatrice is (usually) intelligent, clever, and loyal. She’s also got a chip on her shoulder a mile wide and her friend’s ex and his smarmy divorce lawyer have gotten on her last fucking nerve. So she bursts into the lawyer’s office to give him a talking to, like a cartoon hysterical housewife rather than the bright law student she is normally. Of course, she immediately realizes this was an enormous overstep and wildly unreasonable, but that’s fine – it’s not like she’s ever going to bump into that lawyer – oh that’s right she is literally training to be a lawyer and he’s the new instructor for the course she’s TAing for. Shenanigans ensue.
I don’t love the set up. I think it’s a cheap trick to create drama to start a story with that does a disservice to the characters. Still, once we got over that hump, Bea and Nathan are wonderful together. Nathan forces Bea to understand that the world is complicated, and that things are rarely cleanly good or bad. Bea forces Nathan to come to terms with the ways in which he has compromised his values to advance professionally, and the ways his professional armor has worked to isolate him just as well as her anger has.
There are also the supporting characters, which are not only fleshed out, unique, and enjoyable to read about, but that have their own story arcs which seamlessly integrate with the larger narrative. This is not Bea’s world, or Nathan’s world. It is just a world, and they happen to be the focus, but everyone else is still living their lives, making choices, making mistakes, and picking up the pieces, even when our protagonists aren’t paying attention. And if they don’t like that, well tough.
I will say if you look on Goodreads there are plenty of comments about Bea being Too Much, which is ironic since she herself acknowledges that people think that about her all the time. If only they’d taken the character at her word and not kept reading if they didn’t like women with opinions and zero fucks for people’s comfort in the face of injustice. Yes, she uses anger as armor – all the time. If that sort of thing might try your patience, you might want to walk past this one.
Content warning: An important secondary story line revolves around substance dependency and the ways in which it affects both the person with the dependency and the people around them.
