Book Review: Bromance Book Club

Hello, all!

It's been quite some time since I've posted. Life gets a little crazy sometimes and ultimately, keeping up with this blog was more time and energy than I felt I had. However, I'm trying to restructure my posts and content, so I figured I would put out a single book review of one of my recent reads!

The Bromance Book Club follows Gavin, a major league baseball player who just found out that his wife fakes her orgasms. When he blows up over the revelation, his wife tells him that she wants a divorce. Gavin is blindsided, and doesn't handle the news well, until his teammates agree to help him win his wife back. The kicker? His teammates have a book club, where they read romance novels to help them become better husbands. Skeptical at first, Gavin begins to learn things about his wife that he never knew, thanks to the advice of his romance novels. But will a work of fiction be enough to save his marriage?

I read this book at the end of February, and I still don't think I have enough words to adequately describe how much I adored this book. My personal buy-in for second-chance romances tends to be pretty low, because most times the characters split up because one was terrible to the other, or because they weren't able to communicate.

While Thea and Gavin definitely had trouble communicating, Lyssa Kay Adams showed it not as a plot point, but as an issue that evolved over time in their marriage. Gavin, in the beginning, felt like the divorce came out of nowhere, but as he REALLY started trying to get to know her again, he had to come to terms with the fact that their marriage hadn't been good for a long time. Thea also had to come to terms with the fact that she hadn't been communicating her issues to Gavin, and that even after years of being married, she still hadn't worked out all of her trust issues. 

In The Bromance Book Club, not only do you get a couple that both have their own issues to work out, but you get a hero with a stutter (and a heroine that accepts it with no problems), a heroine who puts her foot down and is determined to follow her dreams without any care for what others think (and a hero who supports her without question), but you also get a huge group of men who read romance to understand women better, and who all own up to the fact that marriage is HARD. This book was heart warming and swoony, but showed the hard parts of being in a relationship. This was a 5 star read for me, and it'll be one I hold dear for a long time.

One last thing I'll leave you with is one of my favorite quotes from the book, and if the quote on it's own doesn't make you want to read a book about men who read and discuss romance novels to keep their wives happy, I don't know what will. When the book club recruits Gavin and they're trying to explain the benefits of reading romance, one of the guys speaks up and says:

"Look man, men are idiots. We complain that women are so mysterious and shit, and we never know what they want. We fuck up out relationships because we convince ourselves that it's too hard to figure them out. But the real problem is with us. We think we're not supposed to feel things and cry and express ourselves. We expect women to do all the emotional labor in a relationship and then act confused when they give up on us."

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Has anyone read The Bromance Book Club yet, and what did you think? Does this sound like something up your alley? 

I'm hoping to update this blog more often, so please feel free to leave any book suggestions in the comments, or reach out to me via Facebook or Twitter. You're also welcome to keep up with what I'm reading on Goodreads. See you guys soon, happy reading!