Somewhere midway through the chapter two “Oh no my friend brought me to breakfast with my one night stand from last night and it’s her mom” scene of Mistakes Were Made I realised that Meryl Wilsner had sucked me in for the ride. It was truly an outstanding entry in the awkward reunion genre, a little awkward, a little sexy, a little funny. It set the tone for the rest of the book, and it was enough to get me over my general mistrust of age gap romances.
Actually, the thing that honestly set the tone, and the thing I cannot help bang on about despite myself was the fact that in chapter one our two protagonists, Cassie, a senior in college, and Erin, a late thirties divorcee, have sex in the back of a rental car. I bring it up so much because it really is a spectacular outlier in the genre. Most of the romances I have read so far this year feature one or two sex scenes, with possibly the implication of more. Mistakes Were Made has, to quote the author “8.5 sex scenes… cunnilingus in the shower…” and bless them for it. There’s no other way of saying it, this book is hot, sexy as hell. This book makes me want to make a girl blush and do frankly filthy things to her in the shower, and apparently makes me feel comfortable enough to just say that in a review. I read a lot in public, and this was one book where I absolutely could not do that for extended periods of time without running into a passage that gave me the feeling like I should definitely stop.
In it’s more restrained moments, when everyone manages to keep their clothes on, Mistakes Were Made is also a book about expectations, to quote Cassie and later Erin, “Fuck Should”. It’s about living in the shadow of someone else’s hopes for your life and taking the parts of it you actually want for yourself and discarding the rest, not letting them hold you back. It’s a book about being happier with yourself than you have been in a long time, it’s a book about finding the space to let someone in and make you feel happier, and yes, it’s a book about letting someone make you come a lot.