Author: Cara Bastone
Year published: 2024
Category: Adult fiction (romance)
Pages: 400 pages
Rating: 4.5 out of 5
Location: (my 2024 Google Reading map): USA (NY)
Summary: Eve Hatch lives for surprises! Just kidding. She expects every tomorrow to be pretty much the same as today. She loves her cozy apartment in Brooklyn that’s close to her childhood best friend Willa, and far from her midwestern, traditional family who has never really understood her. While her job is only dream-adjacent, it’s comfortable and steady. She always knows what to expect from her life . . . until she finds herself expecting after an uncharacteristic one-night stand.
The unplanned pregnancy cracks open all the relationships in her life. Eve’s loyal friendship with Willa is feeling tense, right when she needs her the most. And it’s actually Willa’s steadfast older brother, Shep, who steps up to help Eve. He has always been friendly, but now he’s checking in, ordering her surprise lunches, listening to all her complaints, and is . . . suddenly kinda hot? Then, as if she needs one more complication, there’s the baby’s father, who is (technically) supportive but (majorly) conflicted.
Up until this point, Eve’s been content to coast through life. Now, though—maybe it’s the hormones, maybe it’s the way Shep’s shoulders look in a T-shirt—Eve starts to wonder if she has been secretly desiring more from every aspect of her life.
Over the course of nine months, as Eve struggles to figure out the next right step in her expanding reality, she begins to realize that family and love, in all forms, can sneak up on you when you least expect it.
Review: Every month when I see the list of potential Book of the Month books, I have a difficult time deciding which ones to get because I often want multiple. In the past few months I have given in to that "need." This book was one of those choices.
I enjoyed this book overall though it took me a bit to get into it. There isn't really any "action," except that we do see Eve's experience through pregnancy (and boy did it bring back a ton of memories). By the end of the novel when she is giving birth I was in tears, picturing the birth of my own daughter. It brought back the physical and emotional experience of it all. Whew.
The author did a good job of showing how pregnancy can affect the woman, the sperm donor (in the case of this novel), and the woman's friends. I, too, had a friend who was struggling with fertility while I was pregnant and I appreciated how that was dealt with in this novel. It's a tough thing on both sides of that experience since I felt like a huge (literal) reminder of my friend's struggles.
I liked the blossoming friendship/love between Eve and Shep, the awkwardness of her relationship with the father of the baby, and how she and her best friend were dealing with it all. They are (mostly) honest with one another, have real feelings, and worked it out in good ways that felt realistic.
Challenges for which this counts:
- Big Book Summer--400 pages
No comments
Post a Comment