Dominique (Dom) Simmons works in a coffee house and
plays football. At one of her practise sessions, the team notices a tall,
beautiful, posh lady hanging around. Unwittingly Dom bumps into the posh lady’s
expensive car and is at the receiving end of some (deserved) attitude. The
lady, Blair Harrington, gives Dom her number with the expectation that Dom will
speak to her insurance company and get back to her. Dom drags her feet on this
till Blair reappears.
Dom begins to know Blair more and discovers that under
the posh, put together exterior is an intense lived life and a woman struggling
with her own complexes.
Big trigger warning: domestic violence plays an
important part in the book and is a big part of both the characters’
backgrounds, albeit in different forms.
Right in the beginning it is established that Dom is a
hook-up specialist and has a long-term friends-with-benefits thing going on
with her roommate Charley. But at the same time, she is described as honest
(particularly about her disinterest in relationships), considerate and kind.
Blair is much more complex. She’s recently divorced
from a verbally, emotionally and physically abusive man after twenty years of
being married to him. She’s had therapy to deal with many, many things in her
life. She obviously has a lot of self-worth and self-esteem issues. She has a
son in university who is gay. All these things make Blair a real person with
depth and dimensions.
The writing is good, yet we struggled through half the
book because Dom was just so meh (despite all the virtues attributed to her).
She was seemingly all sweet and considerate but in her actions, she kept
rejecting Blair in many ways, practically ghosting her and constantly giving
Blair the message that she was unimportant. And then, with her words, Dom said
otherwise to Blair. Despite all good intentions, we didn’t find her behaviour
with Blair okay.
Then there was Charley. Another person who was always
there for Dom, was obviously interested and whom Dom kept rejecting. Again
attributed to Dom’s cluelessness rather than uncaringness.
We confess that at the point where Dom is completely
breaking Charley’s hear we had to abandon this book. We have a huge thing about
love being returned. About love being treasured. About love being treated with
gentleness. We think it takes immense self-absorption and absence of niceness
or caringness for a person to be so clueless and callously break hearts
(Charley’s) and confidence (Blair’s). It takes a huge amount of being
emotionally absent with everyone to not see them at all.
We found Dom totally not nice. However, we’d like to
be fair – the book is doubtlessly well written and draws you in. You actually feel
Blair and feel for her every step of the way. While we have certain idealistic
expectations, admittedly, Dom will not be a write-off for others. Even up to the part we
read (which may be a little over 50%) there are certain sweet scenes.
However, this one wasn’t for us. At. All.
