This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.
Genres: Contemporary Romance
Published by Kensington
Released on May 10, 2016
Pages: 242
Format: eARC
Source: NetGalley
For months now I have been fascinated with a series by Olivia Dade about librarians falling in love. Two books in, I picked up Mayday with so much excitement, but found myself feeling a little off and not very into a the story.
We start with a one night stand, but just any one night stand. Helen Murphy is a virgin, working part-time at the local library and living in her parents house after the bookstore she worked in went out of business. She steps out of her shell to approach the mayor, Wes Ramirez, at the local bar and within minutes they are leaving for his house. Now, I really didn’t like Wes, he didn’t worry about Helen’s pleasure of deal with her virginity, but to give him some credit, she didn’t tell him she was a virgin. Right afterwards, he takes her back to the bar and says some things she takes wrong, but anyone would have.
Leap forward months later and we learn more about the characters. Helen is up for a second part time position at the library that would make her full time with the two positions. To show she is the right person for the Community Outreach Coordinator position she takes on planning the city’s May Day celebration. Who does she happen to have to work closely together? You guessed, Mayor Wes.
We also learn that Wes was having one of the worst days of his life the night he took Helen home. He’s trying hard to be a good mayor, but everything just isn’t going his way. The May Day celebration is his last ditch plan to revitalize the city. Working with Helen is a good thing, but he knows he hurt her emotionally that first night. He starts off with trying to be her friend, then onto being her lover and trying to correct all the wrong he has done to her emotions.
Let’s get to business on what was off about this book and what was good about it too, because in the end it was just a good book, not great.
Helen and Wes are in their latter 30s, but they felt about 10 years younger in the story. Wes had a scholarship to college, but when he gets injured and unable to compete, he loses the scholarship and the money to continue college. He’s not really into school nor great at learning, but I wouldn’t say he is dumb. He comes back home and teaches swimming to under privileged kids when they challenge him to become mayor. So I guess I was wondering how he made a living just teaching swimming and buying his own house?
There there is Helen who was a thirty-sex year old virgin. She loves books. Working at a bookstore was a dream, but when it went under, she had to move in with her parents and take a part-time job at the reference desk at the library. She has looked for a job around the area, but there isn’t anything in the area of dealing with books. She also doesn’t want to move away from the area and has small town dreams. So she goes to college, works in a book store for …. years? Then moves in with her parents.
The two grew up going to school together, then spend years in the same town never really crossing paths and now a decade after college, Helen decides to hook up for one night with the mayor, losing her virginity and then moving onto another one night stand with a different man while Wes is trying to figure things out. It just seemed like they were younger than what the author wanted us to believe.
Second, Wes is a wuss. Now other way to say it. He is so insecure that I wanted to scream at times. He gets better over the course of the book, but I really didn’t dislike or like him for more than half of the book. Hero…well, I never got that feeling. He falls hard and fast for Helen, but has to grovel a lot after what he said and did too her.
The May Day celebration is huge for both of their careers, so sometimes it bordered on ridiculous what they had to do to get it to go off without disasters. People are watching them both, for Wes a possible mayor position in another town and for Helen another part-time position that added to her current one would make her full-time.
Now, I know sex is supposed to be good and dirty, but it felt off. He said the words and did the deeds, but I found it all to be crude for two people who seem uptight. I found Helen to be wound up tighter than a top and Wes, while a ladies man, just didn’t do it for me. There was a zero to sixty mentality for the way they fell in love and into bed. No background besides that one night and he is instantly in love with her.
So onto the good….the camaraderie of the librarians is fun and hilarious to watch. They get together for some of the celebrations and I laughed so hard. The group is made up of young and mature women all ripe to fall in love. Some have and it was a great way to revisit their stories without them taking over this one. These women were the saving grace for most of the book. I also like the look into a future story, although not the next one in the series.
Again, the story isn’t horrible, it just felt off in a lot of ways. There are funny moments, some sweetly hot moments, but there were people I just didn’t connect with over the course of the story. I am hoping this is a fluke in an otherwise great series I have grown to love.
About Olivia Dade
While I was growing up, my mother kept a stack of books hidden in her closet. She told me I couldn’t read them. So, naturally, whenever she left me alone for any length of time, I took them out and flipped through them.
Those books raised quite a few questions in my prepubescent brain. Namely: 1) Why were there so many pirates? 2) Where did all the throbbing come from? 3) What was a “manhood”? 4) And why did the hero and heroine seem overcome by images of waves and fireworks every few pages, especially after an episode of mysterious throbbing in the hero’s manhood?
Thirty or so years later, I have a few answers.
1) Because my mom apparently fancied pirates at that time. Now she hoards romances involving cowboys and babies. If a book cover features a shirtless man in a Stetson cradling an infant, her ovaries basically explode and her credit card emerges. I have a similar reaction to romances involving spinsters, governesses, and librarians.
2) His manhood. Also, her womanhood.
3) It’s his “hard length,” sometimes compared in terms of rigidity to iron. I prefer to use other names for it in my own writing. However, I am not picky when it comes to descriptions of iron-hard lengths. At least in romances.
4) Because explaining how an orgasm feels can prove difficult. Or maybe the couples all had sex on New Year’s Eve at Cancun.
During those thirty years, I accomplished a few things. I graduated from Wake Forest University and earned my M.A. in American History from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I worked at a variety of jobs that required me to bury my bawdiness and potty mouth under a demure exterior: costumed interpreter at Colonial Williamsburg, high school teacher, and librarian. But I always, always read romances. Funny, filthy, sweet—it didn’t matter. I loved them all.
Now I’m writing my own romances with the encouragement of my husband and daughter. I found a kick-ass agent: Jessica Alvarez from Bookends, LLC. I have my own stack of books in my closet that I’d rather my daughter not read, at least not for a few years. I can swear whenever I want, except around said daughter. And I get to spend all day writing about love and iron-hard lengths.
So thank you, Mom, for perving so hard on pirates during my childhood. I owe you.
Shari
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Sounds good I guess
It was just ok. Some things just kept getting on my nerves.
Sometimes its the little things that pull one out of the story. I ponder the ‘how can that work’, ‘why did they’ stuff frequently and if there are enough of them in a story it gets too distracting. But glad there was a lot of good with the librarian sisterhood.
I will definitely continue this series, but this one just fell flat for me.
Maybe Wes was trying to hard to be like Christian Gray or something? lol
I never read the books about Christian Gray so I can’t compare.