I have been waiting for Astrid Parker Doesn’t Fail for months. Ever since I read Delilah Green Doesn’t Care back in June as the first in my spree of reading every sapphic romance I could get my hands on. I realise this isn’t as long as many people wait for books, I myself used to be someone waiting for Winds of Winter before losing interest some years back, but I’ve been impatient, and I’ve been a good girl and sometimes I get nice things, even before Christmas. It was always going to be a tough act to follow. Delilah was my first of this kind of thing, and I fell madly in love with Delilah herself from the second I saw her dark curly hair and tattooed arms on the cover (it’s me, the curly haired new tattoo haver). But Astrid was a worthy follow up, a delightful tale of two people recovering from a terrible first impression to find themselves in each other.
Weirdly, in trying to think about what the themes I wanted to talk about here in the review, I realised that a lot of the way that Astrid Parker drew it’s relationships in and specifically the character of Astrid herself was pretty similar to a lot of the Steddie fic I’ve been reading. Astrid Parker is a woman who is not given the space to learn about herself until her early thirties as she is dealing with the weight of expectations, in her case the overbearing attention of her mother Isabel. Whereas Delilah was a book about finding yourself and a home after years of neglect, Astrid is the consideration of what happens when you have so much attention that it smothers you. Astrid had the perfect home, the perfect future husband and the perfect job and it’s only now, once one of those things has blown up in a spectacular manner, that she is able to take a moment and consider if any of those things were what she wanted, rather than what was expected of her.
Enter Jordan Everwood. The black sheep of the Everwood family, she has returned to live with her grandmother after the end of her marriage, just in time for family home to be the subject of a HGTV renovation show, where the local designer will be a certain stuck up local, a local who gives off a spectacularly bad first impression after a coffee collision and appears to want to gut all the charm out of the old inn. The way these two circle each other, and then the way that they make each other whole again was charming to read, and if it doesn’t have the sheer impact on my life that the first one did, that’s only because you can only have your first time once, and also probably that neither Jordan nor Astrid is quite the combo of my type and me that sent me for a damn loop that first time.