Part of Your World

I nearly set this book down after the second chapter, when we're all hanging out in a rural VFW betting about being able to pick up out-of-towners. But I didn't - and I'm glad I didn't.

I'm not appealed by the "big-shot big-city woman with icy heart meets down-to-earth country boy and abandons her ambitions to adopt the simple life with him" as a trope, in general, and that's what I thought this book would be. It almost is - but we manage to subvert it. This isn't a book dressing down a successful woman. This is a book about abuse and privilege, and all the forms those can come in.

I'll admit that it was pretty hard for me to read this much about abuse, as a survivor of an emotionally abusive relationship. But it's still a romance novel, which means that by the end of the book, all of the victims have escaped or on the road towards escaping. We see an abuser claim to understand what he's done and be on the road to recovery as well (take that with a grain of salt - abusers love to be able to leverage the language of therapy to manipulate their victims even further). We still get a happy ending.

The one aspect of this book that I didn't love was the mysticism around the town; it's referred to in a cute way early in the book, but becomes more and more heavy-handed as the book progresses, summoning out-of-season acorns and mysterious weather to try and manipulate the MCs together. I could have done without it, this detail felt really jarring and took me out of the story with an eye roll each time.

Also, I gotta say, this is borderline closed-door. We get maybe one-and-a-half euphemistic sex scenes, and they're very short. Smut-lovers take note.