Okay, book read, homework done. My first book back into romance was First Time Caller by B. K. Borison.
For a certain portion of this book, I was living, I was laughing, I was loving. This was my moment. Cozy romance, Sleepless in Seattle nostalgia.
And then it hit me like a train, "this is falling under the same formula... oh look they're fucking. Yep."
Followed immediately by the thought that, okay, I'm not looking for a mind-blow... or any kind of blowing from this book, actually. I just want to have a good read.
I do this thing to myself sometimes. I overthink so much that I'm not even sure whether I'm having a good time anymore, and I've started doing it with the things I do during my free time too. It's like nothing is worthy enough of actually spending time on, so instead I scroll through social media, waste even more time, and feel like shit afterwards.
But this post is not about my looming feeling of emptiness inside. We're looking for love! And I did find it!
Love is complicated. Not everything is good or bad, and I hated some things about this book, but there were also things I enjoyed.
If you love clichés, tropes and steam (can you believe I forgot what the kids call erotic scenes in books now?), then this is it. At the beginning, I liked both characters. I liked the setting and how easy it was to read, but then the following started happening:
❇ I started noticing just how heavily over-troped it is. A quirky family, an awkward FL, a no-bullshit ML, and a best friend who, the moment I read hima and saw he had beef with another female character I thought "there’s your sequel". I went to check after I finished the book, and yes, the next one is indeed about the best friend and that mystery character he has tension with.
❇ Grumpy x Sunshine would work flawlessly (and I genuinely liked Aiden) if it weren't for the fact that his personality didn't make much sense for the kind of job he had, which eventually led me to believe he was probably not very good at it. We're told Aiden is the host of a radio show about love and romance. Him not believing in love is not the issue, that's a plus in the character's dyanmics. His personality being that of the grumpy, skeptical love interest with a "heartbreaking" backstory that doesn't really break my heart much is. Yes, there's suffering, but no, there's no tragedy there to really justify this personality strongly enough for me. We're introduced once again to these types of cookie-cutter personalities that just feel... empty. They're cute enough for a read. But they get tiring really quickly.
❇ A recurring thought that kept popping into my head while reading this book came from a tweet I read about how the forbidden romance/"we can't be together" trope between white cis people is sometimes just... ? Just date? I can understand a story being more complicated than that, but with this particular one, I kept thinking... what exactly is stopping these two? I don't think the whole "I'm not what you're looking for" thing was enough for me.
❇ I love a good "he's obsessed with her" moment in which the ML can't stop thinking about her and romance is romancing. But I lose my shit when characters are over-praised. This happened to me with Things We Never Got Over by Lucy Score, and I absolutely hated it. With that one it was worse because it felt like everyone was obsessed with the FL and treated her like she was an angel on Earth, and it was just so unrealistic? First Time Caller borders on this with lines like:
"She's not what I expected."
"Most people aren't Lucie."
And my personal favorites, just so you really get that our female character is not like the others, she's sunshine on Earth and too good to be true:
"Lucie. You're... captivating. I think the whole city is in love with you."
"Lucie shifts to accommodate me and I catch a whiff of motor oil. Fresh soap and... daisies."
"I talked about how to change a tire the other night. For twenty minutes.""It was charming."
I don't know. Maybe these types of things are natural and I'm just not into them.
But despite all the things that made me roll my eyes, there were also lines that reminded me why I had liked the book so much in the beginning, and what I can also take from it, so it only feels fair to put those here too:
"After six years of hosting Heartstrings, Baltimore's romance hotline, I've discovered people don't want to be told how to fix their lives or be held accountable. They just want to hear themselves talk and validate their narcissism."
Felt like it hit right on the spot.
"I stopped dating because it wasn't working for me and I think I hoped that another option might materialize. Nothing in my life has ever panned out the way I planned for it. And that's okay. But I don't want a relationship to be something I cross off my checklist, or something I do because I feel like I have to. I don't want to be with someone if they're not giving me something I don't already have. I don't want to waste my time on things that don't feel like everything I've always wanted for myself."
Rewriting this quote here reminded me of why I liked this book in the beginning. I connected with Lucie's conversation on the radio. She spoke about something I had perhaps felt somewhere inside myself too, and I liked the idea that everyone listening to her connected with it as well.
"I've become so many versions of myself and so has he, but we've found a way to fall in love with one another over and over again. Every time."
I also loved this line because I've always been a romantic, the type who dreams of having something with one person for the rest of my life... but as a human being, an overthinking one, that concept is frightening as hell and difficult to process.
It's a dichotomy between wanting the people in my life to always be the same, to always stay with me, and another part of me that thinks: how is that possible if I'm constantly changing? I can't even guarantee myself that I'll love someone romantically like that forever. Is it even a commitment I am willing to make?
But with lines like this, the answer kind of falls into my lap naturally. Of course we change. The thing that makes love work, what makes it worth it, is that we become different people across our lifetime, with different styles, likes and shapes, but so does the other person. And perhaps the proof of our love is our ability to continue loving them through those changes.
So, all in all, I wouldn't say it's a book that killed me. I thought it was okay, it disappointed me a little, but left me with some nice lines as well.
P.S.: SPICE! That's the word.
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