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.
