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_Rafe_, Rebekah Weatherspoon
Aug. 6th, 2020 11:00 pmThis seems to be the second book I have read by Rebekah Weatherspoon and I have enjoyed them both immensely. There are a lot more, so I feel very happy that I have so many delightful things to look forward to!
The front matter in the material makes it super clear that this is a Very Fluffy Book. And indeed, it is very fluffy. Exactly what I needed.
Sloan is a child prodigy who grew up to be a heart surgeon. Divorced (from another heart surgeon), and recently moved from Seattle (where she lived with the ex — grew up in Rhode Island), she Has It All: new friends, a nanny to take care of her 6 year old twin daughters while she is at work, and a fabulous job.
Unfortunately, the nanny leaves (not a spoiler — that is the opening scene of the book), and she works her friend network to come up with a quick replacement to at least get her to when school opens.
The friend network produces the title character, Rafe, and you can go read his description yourself. He is a bit older than Sloan, and has a much less prestigious career path that included a few months in juvenile for car theft. Because he was under 18, it does not show up on a background check, but he is very forthright about it.
Look: you know how this is going to go, and the book goes there in the most delightful way imaginable. The kids are awesome. Sloan is believably brilliant and _young_, and making exactly the kind of mistakes that come with young, but learning maximally from every single one. It is pretty tough to make a fluffy interracial romance novel work; by carefully depicting the family and friendship network (which is presumably further developed in other books), the smoothness in which everyone gets through a lot of pretty difficult hurdles makes a ton of sense — the backstory is not gratuitously trauma ridden, but it is clear that these are all people who started in one place and worked hard to get to a better place, and not just in terms of money and prestige.
One factor I should note. Rafe started life in Woburn before moving to Santa Monica where all this occurs. And I already noted the RI->Seattle->Cali part. The author’s bio says she used to live in Southern New Hampshire before moving to California. There is a very, very real possibility that I love this author in part — and find her characters super relatable in part — because of speech patterns and regional patterns of interaction that would not make as much sense to someone who did not have a related history of moves (NE -> west coast or vice versa).
The front matter in the material makes it super clear that this is a Very Fluffy Book. And indeed, it is very fluffy. Exactly what I needed.
Sloan is a child prodigy who grew up to be a heart surgeon. Divorced (from another heart surgeon), and recently moved from Seattle (where she lived with the ex — grew up in Rhode Island), she Has It All: new friends, a nanny to take care of her 6 year old twin daughters while she is at work, and a fabulous job.
Unfortunately, the nanny leaves (not a spoiler — that is the opening scene of the book), and she works her friend network to come up with a quick replacement to at least get her to when school opens.
The friend network produces the title character, Rafe, and you can go read his description yourself. He is a bit older than Sloan, and has a much less prestigious career path that included a few months in juvenile for car theft. Because he was under 18, it does not show up on a background check, but he is very forthright about it.
Look: you know how this is going to go, and the book goes there in the most delightful way imaginable. The kids are awesome. Sloan is believably brilliant and _young_, and making exactly the kind of mistakes that come with young, but learning maximally from every single one. It is pretty tough to make a fluffy interracial romance novel work; by carefully depicting the family and friendship network (which is presumably further developed in other books), the smoothness in which everyone gets through a lot of pretty difficult hurdles makes a ton of sense — the backstory is not gratuitously trauma ridden, but it is clear that these are all people who started in one place and worked hard to get to a better place, and not just in terms of money and prestige.
One factor I should note. Rafe started life in Woburn before moving to Santa Monica where all this occurs. And I already noted the RI->Seattle->Cali part. The author’s bio says she used to live in Southern New Hampshire before moving to California. There is a very, very real possibility that I love this author in part — and find her characters super relatable in part — because of speech patterns and regional patterns of interaction that would not make as much sense to someone who did not have a related history of moves (NE -> west coast or vice versa).