Book Review: How Sweet It Is - Melissa Brayden

How Sweet It Is – Melissa Brayden

Confession: I read a lot of lesbian romance novels. My college thesis advisor introduced me to Radclyffe’s books (I think Love’s Tender Warriors) but it wasn’t until my dissertation picked up that I started reading lesbian romance novels all the goddamn time. And of the metric ton of lesbian romances I’ve read, Melissa Brayden’s How Sweet It Is was easily one of my favorites to read. (This is saying something, because while I love lesbian romance novels, I am often critical of them – please stop with the insta-marriage, baby-stealing, and sex scenes that involve touching each other’s souls!)

I’d read Brayden’s first novel, Waiting in the Wings (about a Broadway hopeful! Lesbian Love, The Musical!) when it came out, and thought it was solid at the time (the first half of the novel is especially good – Brayden takes a risk that doesn’t quite work for me in the second half of the book, but you should read it anyway). So I was looking forward to seeing how Brayden had changed as a writer, and spoiler alert – she was good two years ago, but she is much, much better now. The dialogue in How Sweet It Is is genuinely funny and sweet, the characters are well-written and mostly consistent, and, best of all, Brayden is far, far away from uber-Xena territory. (You know where this is, even if you haven’t been there yourself; you can recognize uber-Xena from a distance because her glacial-blue eyes are burning into your soul … blue like the bluest flame, setting your heart and pants on fire. Ahem.)

So Brayden is an even better writer than she used to be, and she starts How Sweet It Is with a real problem: can town sweetheart and baking whiz Molly O’Brien fall in love with her dead wife’s younger sister (and all-around badass) Jordan? (Obviously, the answer is “yes;” the real problem is whether Brayden can make their relationship work for the reader.) It’s a question for romance novels in general – no character emerges from a vacuum, so how do you deal with your characters’ past relationships and specifically, the ways that your protagonists use their past relationships to make sense of their new ones. If you’re a sloppy writer, it usually goes something like this: my past girlfriends were the worst and I’d never known true happiness until that night we kissed in the moonlight and our souls and bodies touched for the very first time. It’s an easy fix, although an unsatisfying one.

Brayden can’t do this, though, because the first relationship in question is with Jordan’s older sister Cassie, who tragically dies in a plane crash four years before the book begins; throwing Cassie under the bus doesn’t make sense because both Molly (town sweetheart) and Jordan (badass who’s been MIA for years) are still very much mourning her loss. So Brayden, in a way, has to sell two romances: in order to sympathize with Molly’s grief over Cassie’s death, we have to know what she’s lost; we also have to root for Molly and Jordan without minimizing the impact of Cassie’s death on both their lives (and without being creeped out by their relationship). It’s a delicate balance to strike, but Brayden makes it work, I think.

This in part due to how well Brayden writes Molly and Jordan. (It’s also helped by the following: the fact that Jordan has been MIA since Cassie’s funeral, that Jordan is as different from Cassie as two sisters can be, and that Jordan and Molly have a pre-existing friendship outside their shared love for Cassie. If Brayden weren’t a good writer, though, these alone would not be enough to make the relationship work for me.) Molly is hugely sympathetic – she’s processing her wife’s death (I cried salty tears, for real), she’s trying to keep her failing bakeshop open (curse you, Starbucks!), she’s dealing with her father’s poor health, and she’s also dealing with the possibility that she might lose the support of her in-laws if they find out she’s in love with their other daughter, too.

Jordan is also engaging and dynamic, but she’s more of an enigma than Molly is – she seems to struggle less with the weirdness of dating Molly, and was way, way more accommodating of Molly’s hesitation than the situation demanded. This is to say, she always seems to get why Molly’s backing off, even when Molly doesn’t, and maybe it’s that she’s had more practice in loving Molly while Molly’s affection for Jordan is still very much in process, but. Her motivations were also at times less clear to me. For example, she does the horrible romance novel thing where she ends the relationship to be noble and shit: “She could do for Molly what Molly couldn’t do for herself. Because Molly was too noble, too loyal to look out for her own needs. But Jordan could do that for her.” And: argh, Jordan! You need to trust that the person you’re in a relationship with is an adult. Who can make her own decisions. Leave a relationship if you’re unhappy, but don’t frame it as protecting the other person. /endrant. And because Jordan is – up until this point – super communicative about what she needs and wants, this seemed weird to me.

I also wanted more information about Jordan’s relationship with her parents. Partly this was because their transformation from “we are super creeped out” to “we are now willing to help Molly get her girl!” was way too fast for me. I was like, hmm, when last we met, parents, you were berating Jordan for always being jealous of Cassie and trying to get everything Cassie had. Now you just want those two crazy kids to be happy. I know parents just don’t understand, but come on. That was a pretty dramatic shift – and I also wanted a peek into Jordan’s headspace given the fact that her parents are really effing awful to her.

(There is this really sad moment when – after Molly and Jordan have been caught macking it by Jordan’s parents – Jordan understands Molly’s distress at losing the affection of the in-laws who think she’s perfect and wonderful and can do no wrong. And it’s sad because it’s also clear that these same parents never felt this way about Jordan. I wanted to hug her. But, also, another real reason to learn more about Jordan’s feelings here is because this could potentially be a source of conflict in her future relationship with Molly, it seems to me, and it gets kinda swept under the table.)

Anyway. The wonderful parts of this book are Molly and Jordan’s interactions, though. They’re fun together. For example, after they first kiss and there are feels, Molly finds Jordan and says, “How are you this morning, Jordan? I trust you’re well,” and we are treated to the following: “I trust you’re well? Were they now characters in a Jane Austen novel and she’s failed to be notified? Since when did they speak so formally to each other? Oh, this didn’t bode well. ‘I’m fine. Just a little worried about the fact that you’re talking to me like we’re at high tea.’” So good.

And as readers, we get to watch the sort of casual affection Molly and Jordan have for each other develop into a playful and loving relationship. It’s really wonderful. There are scenes in the book that made me feel like I was actually watching a relationship develop. For example, there is this great moment when, in a post-coital conversation, Molly asks Jordan what she’d do if stranded on a desert island, and Jordan says, “Perfect the great American cartwheel. No question. You?” And then when Molly says, “Your cartwheel, while festive, won’t keep you alive,” Jordan goes into this delightful little nonsensical rant about how she’s going to be the mayor of cartwheels and get the key to Cartwheel City and how Molly can visit some day if she wants. And this a great moment because it’s the sort of silliness that real relationships have tons of but is tragically underrepresented in romance novels.

This, I think, was the real draw of How Sweet It Is for me – what I like about the book is that while it is a sweet love story, it also acknowledges and skillfully navigates the difficult emotional realities of its protagonists. While Jordan initially wants Molly to see her for herself (i.e., without thinking about Cassie), I think both Molly and Jordan learn to be comfortable with the fact that they can build a relationship in light of their shared loss, rather than in despite of it. 

So, sistren, this book doesn't come out until November 18, but you should read it when it does. Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC.