Hi!! I’m back and here to love on my blog while I tackle my novel. I’ve been reading the entire time since I wrote my last post, but I went through a pretty sustained period of writer’s block. I read book after book (34 this year, including this one) and struggled to find titles that made me want to just linebacker sprint to my keyboard so that I could tell you about them. And I read some good books too, so it was intensely frustrating.

Enough of that though— I wriggled myself free from writer’s block once I decided that I was going to read something incredibly light. I wanted something rich and easy to swallow, nothing that would make my heart rate shoot up in a bad way.

I found that in THIS!

Ready or Not by Cara Bastone was a dream!

It took me maybe four days to finish, but I read other things in between this one. But ultimately, I kept coming back to this one, it was addictive.

Here’s What It’s About

Eve Hatch is messy. She kind of stumbles into most things in her life, whether it’s a job she didn’t set out to get but kept working anyway, dating multiple men named Derek or accidentally falling in love with her oldest friend’s big brother… after getting pregnant with someone else’s baby.

Hold it! This isn’t the story of some trashy, hot mess millennial. She’s an adorable hot mess millennial.

Eve is not ready for a kid. She just wants to finally get her dream job at the nature conservation organization she works at, (instead she’s an administrative assistant) or maybe some more money so she can continue to overdecorate her apartment while hanging out with her best friend Willa on the weekends.

Instead, she gets an unplanned pregnancy.

After a night of bar-crawling with friends, Eve wasn’t ready to go home for the night, everything felt so starry and too perfect to call it good on this hot, blissful, NYC night.

So, she decides to make the decision that ultimately propels her into unexpected motherhood: she goes to a bar called Good Boy on her own.

Good Boy is a bar for dogs and people. She sits down at the counter and is almost instantly smitten with the unreasonably gorgeous bartender, Ethan. A quick flirtation turns into a promise for more, and then they ‘end up’ at Ethan’s apartment, sharing a night that Eve will never forget. Literally.

What happens next is a hurricane of complications that threaten Eve’s ability to really be happy about this little person that she’s going to meet frighteningly sooner rather than later.

There’s also these two facts: 1. Eve is a good person, like so good of a person that she doesn’t want Ethan to feel bad for getting her pregnant and not knowing if he wants to be involved. 2. The father of her child is also a good person, but he comes with at least seven hundred tons of baggage.

These two facts partly propel the story forward, with the reader and Eve wondering if she’ll really have to endure this pregnancy and raise this baby alone?

Here are a few things I liked about this book and why any other romance book lovers might like it:

• Bastone writes with a soul aching clarity in what could have easily been another formulaic rom-com. We feel everything that Eve is feeling and since she’s pregnant, she feels a lot. But thats the thing about Eve: she feels things so strongly it overwhelms her; she loves fiercely but panics almost constantly. The two seem to mingle when she finds herself facing a new, steamy, and intense relationship with Shep.
• THERE IS NO THIRD ACT BREAKUP.
• Speaking of heat, the intimate scenes were very well done! Bastone writes the love scenes with wit and confidence. Eve’s not a meek girl, she’s a grown woman that knows exactly what does it for her and she’s extremely comfortable with the most intimate parts of herself. Case in point, look at this line: “There are things I don’t know about Shep. And they are things that I cannot, cannot ask about right now sitting on this couch. They are sweaty things. Hem-of-his-shirt-caught-between-his teeth-so-it-doesn’t-get-in-the-way-things.” Oh my God, what?! This line took me out.
• Oh and about Shep, he’s the guy that’s always been in the background. Eve’s best friend’s with his sister Willa, but he’s always accompanied them on their shenanigans as they grew up in Michigan. The previously sun deprived flower of a young man he was, glued to a wall and watching Eve, hoping to bloom at some point has blossomed into a grown ass man. A man with a job he cares about, a man that women can’t stop looking at so much that it’s rude, one with taut muscles and the stamina of a trackstar, and one that is…single. And it seems like a baby isn’t going to deter him. Shep is absolutely one of the things I loved about this book. He was sexy without being gross or belittling. He’s literally just the embodiment of the advice I would give to anyone that asks for relationship tips: “Go with the goofy guy.”

The last thing I loved….

It’s ooey gooey. You know what’s not ooey gooey? LITERALLY EVERYTHING going on in the world.

Capitalism may be making everything crumble around us, but they cannot take our ooey gooey romance novels from us!

Anyways, hopefully I convinced you to borrow this book from your local library in person, or request it from your local library on Libby, or suggest that your local library buy it, or sign up for a card in the other library system in your state and when there’s a wait for it there…maybe check that library’s Libby too. Do you see where I’m going with this?

Get your hands on this book any way you can, but please please please check your library first!