Let's Talk Books

First of all, a huge thank you to NetGalley, Rebecca J. Caffery, and the team at HarperCollins. I read the first of these, Pole Position, and was lucky enough to be offered the chance to read First to Finish, for which I am very grateful.

I wouldn’t call myself an F1 fan, by which I mean I have never seen a single second of a single race ever, but I am local to Northamptonshire, and I have worked at Silverstone before (Moto GP) so at the same time, I have a degree of curiosity around the sport. Pole Position, the first in this series, I felt was a good, very readable MM romance, which almost convinced me to give F1 a chance. First to Finish, I felt, was a weaker book, and one which did not inspire the same curiosity in me.

I really wanted to like this, because I had so much fun with Pole Position, but in First to Finish I felt that the writing was clunky and unpolished, in a way that I found really distracting. Sentences ended oddly, unnatural phrases threw off the rhythm, grammatical and sentence structure issues remained, and the dialogue felt stilted and unnatural, almost rehearsed, in a way that reminded me of Hallmark movies and Disney Originals. I have had this trouble with plenty of titles in the Romance genre across publishers, and I’m wondering if it’s a speed over quality thing? Regardless, it’s a real shame. Whilst Pole Position was never going to be in the running for a Booker, it was decidedly more polished, and I wish a little more time had gone into addressing some of these issues in First to Finish.

I think, though, the bigger issue is that I just couldn’t understand what drew Johannes and Caleb together. And moreover, I couldn’t really understand Johannes’s friendship with Harper either. I was being informed of all of this affection, but I really didn’t feel it. The characters felt 2D, with internal monologues that seemed overly self-aware, and occasionally bordered on thera-speak, giving them an unnatural distance from their actions, and the actions of others. Yet, despite this very thorough evaluation of situations and events, their actions and reactions sometimes seemed completely at odds with the reality of a situation: in other words, I just don’t think anyone thinks or acts like that.

The one shining light in this is Caffrey’s ability to write romantic, intimate, and emotional scenes. When they were in the sultry midst of romance the awkwardness seemed to fall away; in the heights of passion, the clunkiness became a smooth and well-rounded; and in moments of pique, or intense misery, or even euphoria, the oddities of internal monologue and dialogue vanished. Caffrey’s strong suit is emotion, romance particularly, and I wish the rest of the book was as strong.

I have high hopes for Caffrey. If I’m right this set Nils up to be the leading man of book 3, and I am curious to see how that pans out. I wanted to like this more than I did, but it was still a readable, entertaining novel. 3 stars.