CBR Bingo: Right (for right pairing, wrong time)
hot take: I’m really torn on this one — at one point I was fuming and ready to give this a two, two but after finishing I appreciate what Jimenez was doing even if I thought it was more harmful than HEA (for the avoidance of doubt there is a HEA)
I’m back, and on further (angry) reflection I’m going to lower my rating for this book because the positives don’t really outweigh the negatives, and I’m actually double mad because this book tricked me into overseeing some negatives that I’ve worked really hard to unteach myself as being ‘romantic.’
Our story starts in Minnesota, where Stephanie meets Dr. Xavier Rush, vet, when an abandoned cat she’s found needs seeing. Dr. Rush has had A Day, encountering the worst of humanity, and he’s a bit curt with our FMC, who proceeds to crowdfund $10,000 for the cat (named Pooter) to get reconstructive anal/digestive surgery. That all aside (and in the first 20 pages, I think), they end up meeting up again, Xavier asks Stephanie on a date. It’s the best date either of them have ever been on, and then Stephanie reveals her secret: her trip to California tomorrow isn’t a trip, but a move–she’s moving back home to help take care of her mother, who has early onset dementia, and whose care is taxing the family’s emotional and fiscal reserves.
But because the date was so good, Xavier and Stephanie decide to try long distance with its attendant challenges. Neither can really move–Xavier is heavily in debt, having opened his clinic only a few years ago and not yet in a place to sell it without essentially going bankrupt, and Stephanie realizes once she’s home that her mother’s care is massively more onerous than she realizes AND that she’s lost out on years of memories already. But also, the best date ever!!!
I should clarify that I’m not dismissive of the ‘magical first date’ trope, given that I myself have felt said vibes before and that it’s the premise for one of my favorite movie series (Linklater’s ‘two people experience connection because of Europe’s lackadaisical train system’ trilogy). Do I think that it’s a bit glossed over here (yes) and am I really getting tired of first person romcoms (yes) but I believed that they had that moment, and I was very interested in how Jimenez was going to solve the rock/hard place problem.
Where it completely lost me, though, was how we’re meant to take Xavier’s behavior as romantic when in actuality it’s the same old stalker-as-romantic nonsense that I learnt from 90s era Bollywood movies and have worked hard to exorcise from my life. To recap: Stephanie half-heartedly tells Xavier to ‘forget her,’ after their first date but then they half-heartedly text. Okay, that’s fine, Xavier can fly out to see her (despite his absolute inability to do so financially, which I will get to).
But at the end of that trip, there’s no beating around the bush. Stephanie unequivocally and clearly tells Xavier to not contact her and move on, because she doesn’t see a pathway forward and feels like continuing to kick the can down the road will only lead to both of them being hurt. In particular, she knows that she will have her heart broken by the inevitable, and so she CLEARLY TELLS HIM TO NOT CONTACT HER.
At this point, there is no texting or calling or sign from Stephanie -at all- that she would welcome communication from Xavier. And yet he fakes a conference in a town two hours away as a pretense to call her (!) and ask if she’d be okay with getting dinner ‘as friends.’ And then, having already put her on the spot, he picks her up with all the trappings of a date (flowers, gift) and takes her to a very romantic restaurant.
It’s just…hard to excuse that sort of behavior, even if we’re rooting for our MMC and FMC to get together. Especially when the solution is super straight forward? Swap visit #2 (Xavier lying and disregarding Stephanie’s clear boundaries) with visit #3 (?) (Stephanie has a work event in Minnesota). Because Xavier never said he wanted to go no-contact, so Stephanie could reach out to him, and then tell him as she’s heading back to hit her up if he’s ever in California for work, and then we’re off to the races.
I’d originally forgotten how much I disliked that element of the story because of how realistic Jimenez is about the challenges of long distance and caring for someone with early-onset dementia. It’s a risk for a romcom to get that granular, and it was piercing enough that I felt myself getting a bit anxious thinking about my own parents and what care they might need one day. But at the same time, the characters are off doing some ridiculous things (an entire home reno? using a home equity loan?? including a kitchen breakdown that apparently takes an afternoon????) that are out of line with the whole vibe, and then you have this really fulsome story about a family getting their act together to care for a beloved matriarch.
Honestly, I would have read a version of this that wasn’t billed as a romcom and was only from Stephanie’s perspective as she tries to juggle being back for her mother, reestablishing her relationships with her siblings, and dealing with this romance that didn’t get a chance to blossom before she left–in part because as a romance novel we have to get a HEA, and the one we get is a cop out to the real challenges faced (and described!!).
