TL;W[on’t]R[ead the Review]: If you like small-town romance, snarky banter, and immediate cozy vibes, read this book.
Content warnings: grief, parental abuse (mostly off-page and in the past)
Summary [courtesy of Goodreads]: She just wanted to claim her inheritance. What she got was a husband… Xeni Everly-Wilkins has ten days to clean out her recently departed aunt’s massive colonial in Upstate New York. With the feud between her mom and her sisters still raging even in death, she knows this will be no easy task, but when the will is read Xeni quickly discovers the decades old drama between the former R&B singers is just the tip of the iceberg. The Secrets, lies, and a crap ton of cash spilled on her lawyer’s conference room table all come with terms and conditions. Xeni must marry before she can claim the estate that will set her up for life and her aunt has just the groom in mind. The ruggedly handsome and deliciously thicc Scotsman who showed up at her aunt’s memorial, bagpipes at the ready. When his dear friend and mentor Sable Everly passed away, Mason McInroy knew she would leave a sizable hole in his heart. He never imagined she’d leave him more than enough money to settle the debt that’s keeping him from returning home to Scotland. He also never imagined that Sable would use her dying breaths to play match-maker, trapping Mason and her beautiful niece in a marriage scheme that comes with more complications than either of them need. With no choice but to say I do, the unlikely pair try to make the best of a messy situation. They had no plans to actually fall in love.
This is an absolutely beautiful book. I could gush about it all day, but the core fact is that Rebekah Weatherspoon has written a glorious ode to kindness, unrealistically inclusive small towns, snarky humor (this book is fucking funny!!), and assertively finding joy and happiness in the midst of life’s hardships. Yes, this is (to an extent) a book about grief, as protagonist Xeni mourns her much-beloved aunt, and it’s also a book about healing from parental abuse with love interest Mason’s plotline. But while the book never minimizes the weight of those issues (and never shies away from dealing with them on-page), it never remotely dips into trauma porn or the kind of conflict-for-conflict’s-sake plotting that so many romances stake their narratives on.
Instead, this is a book about quiet joys, immediately-recognizable kindred spirits, in jokes, and characters who are unflinchingly themselves. Yes, it’s got a bonkers premise, up-ending the marriage of ‘convenience’ plot (somewhat like Didn’t Stay in Vegas) into a ‘marriage of compulsion’ plot whereby the pair can only inherit money if they marry each other for at least 30 days. Like, that premise is so zany that it really shouldn’t work, but with Weatherspoon at the helm it really, REALLY does.
The book is shockingly low-conflict, too, for a book about an arranged marriage, secret family revelations, and an abusive dad. Every time Xeni and Mason chose to keep their relationship going simply because they enjoyed each other was like a breath of fresh air, genre-wise. And the requisite third act ‘breakup’ made SENSE for once, and led to increased emotional maturity rather than codependence. To say the least, I was massively impressed.
Basically, I had massively high hopes for this book, since I loved Rafe, the first book in the ‘series,’ but Xeni WILDLY surpassed those expectations. At this point, it’s one of my favorite romance books of all time, and I’m so glad I read it when I did. (Though it gives glorious late summer/early fall vibes, so I think I might be due for an even more seasonally appropriate re-read in a few months). As an added bonus, both characters are bisexual, and the book does a phenomenal job handling their queerness.