The Bromance Book Club by Lyssa Kay Adams is another book that kept popping up in my feeds on bookstagram and Facebook, and it, too, popped up as a Bookbub special so I immediately hit the download button.
Here’s my hot take on this one: Daaaaaamn.
The Bromance Book Club
I get really annoyed every time a man says he doesn’t understand women.
Hello? Ever heard of a romance novel? It’s literally a manual.
I was so excited to see Adams take this idea and turn it into a book.
The Bromance Book Club is just what it sounds like. A bunch of dudes are using romance novels to save their relationships with women.
It’s funny, refreshing, and witty. This was a one day read for me.
The Characters
The story focuses on Gavin Scott and his wife, Thea. Gavin is a major league baseball player, and Thea gets pregnant after one night in the backseat of his car. They marry, and fast forward three years to when Thea asks for a divorce.
Thea apparently has been faking it.
I recently read Helen Hoang’s The Kiss Quotient, and she includes some interesting research in the back of her book on how women are good at pretending things are okay. So when I read Thea’s backstory, I thought YES! I get this.
That being said…
I don’t totally buy into the pivotal moment when Gavin figured out Thea was faking EVERYTHING. As in her orgasms.
I don’t know about you, ladies, but all orgasms are different. So why wouldn’t Thea react differently to an orgasm than she has before? It’s tenuous but I get what the author was going for, and I’ll play along.
The Story
I needed a sweet story right now, and while the sexual episodes were hot in this book, the overall story carried a sweet sense to it.
Gavin truly wanted to save his marriage, and that’s not often a theme you find in romance novels. Not to the degree Gavin took it. You could feel how much he wanted this. His words were sweet but his actions were sweeter. He read romance novels to save his marriage. (I’m reminded of The Wedding by Nicholas Sparks.)
Thea was not a damsel in distress who needed a major league baseball player to save her. She had her own stuff going for her. This made it easy to root for their marriage because each were coming to it equally.
I really dislike stories that pit the two main characters against each other, and the man needs to save the woman. That’s not this story. This was two people figuring out how to love each other despite everything going against them.
The Sweetness
This is the only way I can think of to incapsulate what I mean here. This story made me feel warm and fuzzy. Yes, it had great, steamy sex scenes, but that wasn’t the point. This is one of those books that make you feel like you’re one of their friends, and you’re just as excited for the happy ending as anything.
The details were down to earth and homey despite the main character being a major league baseball player. I’ve picked up a couple of Christina Lauren books that I just didn’t connect with because the characters were something huge like Broadway people. That wasn’t the case here.
This was just a family, a couple of parents trying to figure out life when their pasts were weighing them down.
Thea
I want to touch on Thea because I connected with her specifically. As I mentioned above, I’m fascinated with a woman’s ability to pretend everything is okay. Thea’s character mastered that, and I loved watching her bloom in this story. She was done pretending, and more, she was tired.
I have said this so many times before. I am tired.
Tired of ________ (insert your thing here).
It was so great to see Thea pick herself up and move on because she deserved a life that truly made her happy.
Trigger Issues
I don’t read books about dogs for obvious reasons, so I like to warn readers about potential issues in books.
In The Bromance Book Club by Lyssa Kay Adams, you will find:
- Infidelity (not between the two main characters)
- Lying
- Sexually explicit scenes (If you don’t like on the page sex, I still encourage you to check out this book because these scenes are tasteful and integral to the plot.)
You May Also Like…
If you liked these books, you may also like The Bromance Book Club by Lyssa Kay Adams:
The Unhoneymooners by Christina Lauren
The Kiss Quotient by Helen Hoang
Final Thoughts
I really loved this book. It was not earth shattering, but it was PERFECT for what I needed right now. Isn’t that the best thing about books? There’s always the exact one you need, and The Bromance Book Club fit the bill for me.
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