Caveat: Spoilers here. Lots. In fact, don’t read this unless you’ve already read the book, don’t plan on reading the book, or just don’t care if you find out everything that happens.
I really wanted to like this book. I swear. I’d read one previously by this author that I didn’t like at all, which more or less spoiled the thought of reading more. But my opinion was swayed: lots of folks love Rachel Gibson, and this particular one was awarded a 2009 RITA. Admittedly I’ve figured out that the RITA nominations (and wins) means little in terms of quality, or at least in terms of what I like. But authors that I like still can produce books that I don’t, and taking the opinion that “fifty million Elvis fans can’t be wrong,” I decided to try Not Another Bad Date.
Adele moves back to her hometown to take care of a sick sister and her niece, and discovers that Zach, her one true love from college, is now coaching the high school football team. He’s a widower, richer than Croesus from a very successful stint in the NFL, and has a daughter the same age as Adele’s niece – and of course, Zach was married to Adele’s archenemy from primary school through college. Adele and Zach fall in lust, then love-ish, then she miraculously gets pregnant (despite an IUD, but more on these mysterious circumstances later). Zach thinks that Adele’s trying to trap him into marriage – just like his deceased wife did – and they split up and Adele moves home. Zach then has an epiphany that he loves Adele with or without accidental pregnancy, so he tracks her down to her home in Boise and proposes. HEA abounds.
I have a lot to say about all of this. A lot.
First of all, the “dead person from not-quite-heaven manipulating people” thing has been done, and much more coherently, by Jude Deveraux in Wishes. In NABD, Devon, Zach’s deceased wife, hasn’t really been good enough to get into heaven so she waits in various in-betweens like Walmart (restricted to the shoe section), and every now and again her afterlife coordinator (and former third grade teacher) shows up and allows her to make a wish to try to do good. With the first wish, she curses Adele to a series of bad first dates, where everything seems to be just fine and nice but then suddenly the men turn into assholes of various colors. (For example, the assistant coach with whom Adele has an enjoyable if not particularly exciting first date, who suddenly turns around and lewdly propositions her with a three-way with one of her friends.) Devon’s second wish makes Adele’s IUD disappear and a condom break, resulting in the accidental pregnancy. I’m not kidding – when Adele goes to the doctor and discovers she’s pregnant, they do an ultrasound and discover that her IUD had literally disappeared. I’m well and fine with a little ghostly guidance every now and again, but Devon’s presence was pervasive between her scenes and constant reminders of her in Adele and Zach’s world, and it was incredibly jarring and not quite obvious what was supposed to be happening when we flashed from earth to Walmart.
On the characters: Zach was an asshole. Really. I think he was supposed to be manly and forceful, but frankly I thought he was a complete asshole, and I could not understand why it was that Adele had fallen for him, either in college or at the present. He was egotistical and demanding, including in the physical scenes with Adele. None were rape or a forced seduction sort of scenarios – I would have far harsher things to say about that – but there was an egotistical demanding from him on top of an almost complete disregard for Adele’s opinions in the situations that I did not find manly or forceful, I found full of asshattery. Again, I know that sounds like a forced seduction but it wasn’t, Adele was definitely agreeing to the seduction. There are definitely good ways to do manly and dominating in seduction scenes and I’ve read plenty. If done right, it adds a level of darkness and overwhelm without necessarily involving submission or force. But the majority of the physical scenes with Adele and Zach felt very definitely unequal. Zach held the upper hand, he knew it, and he wielded it. This made me feel that Adele, though consenting, had little control.
Zach also exhibited lots of other asshattery moments, like telling Adele once that he was visiting her because he was bored even while his mind told him that him that he was visiting because he missed her. I don’t think anyone can mistake being told that you were a better option than boredom for a compliment or anything other than mean and rather petty. Surely this was to demonstrate how Zach fought his own emotions, but as he fights his own emotion he says casually hurtful things.
When Adele and Zach discovered the pregnancy, Zach also exhibited further asshattery by deciding that Adele was trying to trap him into marriage, particularly since he had been burnt by that before with Devon (and since Adele had fatefully mentioned that she would like to have kids in the very vague Someday.) He outright accused Adele of lying to him about having an IUD and told her that he wouldn’t marry her, even though Adele very specifically never said anything about marriage when she told him she was pregnant. Very shortly after, being the southern gentleman that he is, Zach demands that she marry him while she again reiterates that she would not marry him without love, precipitating Adele’s sudden move back to Boise.
On the accidental pregnancy plot happily-ever-after. I have a lot of opinions about pregnancy HEAs for reading surprisingly few of them in contemporary settings. I almost always find them unnecessary, superfluous to the actual plot. I will add that in historicals, I never particularly have a problem with them even though I still find the Regency almost-obligatory happy baby/pregnancy/family epilogue annoying. In context, let’s be fair, most aristocratic marriages in that period were exactly for the purpose of providing progeny for the line. An heir and a spare, if you will. The Happy Family epilogue is almost always outside the actual plot of bringing a hero and heroine together but the actual children there serve a bit of historical purpose, no matter how damn happy they are. So yes, to me, historicals with the Happy Baby get a bit of a blanket pass, however fair that is or isn’t. Baby HEA epilogues in contemporaries are a lot more gratuitous since we no longer live in a society that gauges a woman’s worth by her fertility. I wouldn’t go so far as to think that this is the genre’s way of placing the woman back into traditional roles at hearth and home, nor as a tacit approval of the notion of woman’s worth as solely as a baby-maker nor an endorsement of the opinion that a woman’s happiness can only be achieved by bringing forth new life. But I do think that pregnancy in contemporary romances need to be contextual, a firm part of the plot, whether it’s a planned, unplanned, surprise, or urgent issue. Context, people. Context.
In NABD, the pregnancy thing was so far out of left field - so extra-contextual, if you will – that I expected a billionaire Grecian sheik to next show up, claiming Zach as his heir. Or whatever. I’ll reiterate that the entire pregnancy was caused by some sort of paranormal hocus pocus on the part of Devon, not an actual or realistic plot device. (Condom breaking? Sure. Disappearing IUD? No.) This made me suspicious of the pregnancy-as-plot to begin with. One could possibly argue that as Adele spends a lot of time in the book with her thirteen-year-old niece, her heavily-pregnant sister, and later, her new nephew, that this constitutes a slow build to an appropriate pregnancy. But I have to again go back to the concept of Devon somehow causing the pregnancy from the Great Beyond to negate this idea. Adele’s pregnancy wasn’t a part of a contextual character growth. In fact, Adele’s pregnancy was strangely enough the catalyst for the HEA, not the cause, which made the pregnancy all the more extraneous. (And I’ll add here that Zach’s apparent need to deal with the pregnancy and his belief in Adele’s deliberate deception as a part of him realizing he loved her? Weak and almost offensive.)
What could have made this whole pregnancy plot better? If it hadn’t been initiated by a dead person. Period. However, even if the pregnancy wasn’t the result of Devon’s meddling it would be extraneous, as if something was needed other than Zach’s asshattery and lack of connection with his emotions to cause that roadblock, that crisis point in their romance that would bring them together. There were several other options for that roadblock, by the way. How about Zach’s daughter, who was pissed that he was seeing Adele? That’s a pre-existing child, which is acceptable to me in terms of plot. Or how about Adele’s sister’s toxic pregnancy and dissolving marriage? Or Adele’s and Devon’s enmity and how it would affect her relationship with Zach and his daughter? Or, heavens forbid, if they would have been caught making love in the women’s bathroom at the high school instead of a near-miss, which could have been scandalous and possibly career-ending for Zach? Oh, the options are endless. But instead the plot reverts to not only an old trick, but a very out-of-context old trick.
Sigh.
I’ll close by saying that I really wanted to like this book, and I really tried. I realized very shortly into it that I wasn’t going to love it, and even when I noticed that our hero was someone I didn’t like I kept trying. However, the second that pregnancy was thrown in like the kitchen sink, it was a futile exercise for me. There was no hope of it being redeemed in my eyes.
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