Review: In a Jam

In a Jam by Kate Canterbary is a book that has swept through Romancelandia and I think every review I've seen for it as been positive to positively effusive. I feel like I should start by saying that I did like this book. In fact it was a Bad Decisions Book Club read and I may have found myself staying up until 3AM (yeah, 3AM) to finish it.  But....

Yeah.

Brace yourself kiddies - it's time for one of Wendy's patented Damning With Faint Praise reviews and there will be spoilers.

Shay Zucconi has just been left at the altar, mere hours before she was set to walk down the aisle.  Hundreds a guests, amazing flowers, a magnificent dress she's been starving herself for the past several months to look her absolute best in. Adding insult to injury her now ex calls her on the phone to tell her he's not coming. To say more would ruin the first chapter, but seriously this guy is slime.

Anyway, Shay naturally spirals. She was living with her ex, so she's now camping out on her BFF's couch, drinking too much, eating snack foods and watching terrible reality TV.  Which is how the lawyer finds her.  The lawyer who is overseeing her step-grandmother's estate.  Seems dearly departed granny has left Shay her tulip farm in Friendship, Rhode Island.  Just one small catch to that though - she has to be married within the year in order to keep said inheritance or the property will revert to the town.

Shay doesn't have a ton of options and she can't stay on her friend's couch forever, so she gives notice at her school (she teaches kindergarten) and decides to spend the year on granny's farm. I mean, what else is she going to do?  She has no plans to marry so has resigned to herself that this is temporary. She's taking it as an opportunity to lick her wounds and find herself.

She's barely back in town when she runs into Noah Barden, her next-door-neighbor and her BFF from high school.  Shay was the poor little rich girl dumped on step-granny's doorstep after getting kicked out of boarding school.  Noah was the fat kid with an emotionally dysfunctional family who was counting down the days until he could leave.  Then he meets Shay and he's a goner.  Now all these years later, the legal guardian to his niece, running his family's farm, he's confronted by his unresolved feelings for Shay as she blithely waltzes back into his life - and he's not terribly happy about it.

Let's start with the good - the world-building is fantastic.  Noah's Little Star Farms. The town of Friendship. The endless festivals and Friday night football games.  If you enjoy small town romances, this one is evocatively written. I tend to have little patience for such things, but I couldn't get enough of it in this story.  I also liked the characters.  Noah and his confidence issues.  Shay who is a dynamite teacher but with abandonment issues. Noah's niece Gennie, who has a mountain of emotional trauma and the vocabulary of a sailor on shore leave.

So where does it go wrong?  It's 480 pages long. Hand to God - 480 pages long. Which is just utter nonsense.  I realize some folks think more of a good thing can't be bad - but those folks would be wrong. To fill up those 480 pages we get a lot of repetition to the character baggage.  I get it - Noah was once the fat kid and Shay has abandonment issues stemming from her relationship with her mother. I didn't need it hammered into my skull over and over again.

The other problem with Dear Lord 480 Pages is that to fill all that space, besides the repetition, you get inconsistencies in the character development.  Noah starts out this book with a mighty unrequited love for Shay, always struggling for words when he talks to her, always shading his eyes with his hat etc.  But when they finally do the mattress mambo, he morphs into a Dirty Talking Love Machine who is a pro at double entendres and yes of course he's basically sporting a kick-stand in his pants - like you have to ask?

Shay has Mommy Abandonment Issues, so of course she's always running scared.  You know what makes no sense?  She's ready to walk down the aisle with the steely-eyed determination of an expert marksman. There's zero hint of self-sabotage. In fact she's blind-sided by her ex even though there were red flags she blithely ignored.  And yet she spends the entire second half of this book pushing Noah away with the "logic" of "they'll be better off without me."  And all Noah has done up to this point is basically be Dream Man. I mean the guy does everything for her short of ripping out his own heart and gifting it to her with a big red bow on top.  

But maybe the worst of it for me?  You can't have your characters acknowledge the absurdity of a romance trope and then just have them behave like they no longer realize it's absurd.  When Shay tells Noah about the terms of step-granny's will he basically says (paraphrasing here): You know, that's some BS. There's no way it will legally hold up. I'm a lawyer. I was pretty successful when I worked for a big firm in New York City. I can totally review the will and get you out from under it, inherit step-granny's property with no strings.  What's Shay's answer to this offer?  To decline it of course.  It's what step-granny wanted and there's no sense fighting it.

But we have to keep the "marry in order to inherit the farm thing" because then we wouldn't have our characters marrying for convenience and then where would the story be?  It felt all the more forced because the characters acknowledge how totally nonsensical it is, know they could fight it (rather easily) and then still choose to do nothing.  Like, just leave the reader in Harlequin Presents Land where the characters don't realize the legality (or lack thereof) of the situation.  It's easier to roll with the escapist fun when THE CHARACTERS DON'T ACKNOWLEDGE THE ABSURDITY!

Ahem, anyway.

Damning with faint praise y'all.

I can see why so many readers have loved this book. I really liked it despite the verbal diarrhea that has preceded this paragraph.  It's cute. The characters are great. The world building is phenomenal.  But it's also the kind of book that does not hold up to any kind of scrutiny and Dear Lord It's 480 Pages Long!  WHY?!?!?!?!?  I'm calling it. 100 pages could have easily been gone. I'd go so far as 150 pages.  And if those pages were gone?  This would have been a better book.  Because all that verbal diarrhea above?  Would have been left on the cutting room floor.  Sometimes more is the exact opposite of what you really want or, quite frankly, need.

Final Grade = B-