“So tell us what happened between Oh, my gosh, my inmate husband has a secret baby and I smashed the man who put him in prison,” Yasmen says, resting her chin on her folded hands. “This is some Days of Our Lives shit.”
Kennedy Ryan’s Before I Let Go was one of the best books I read in 2022. I can still call up the big emotions between a divorced couple who are trying to co-parent and run a business together while also trying to move on. Yasmen’s friend, Soledad, was in an unhappy marriage, and it was clear the next book in the Skyland series would be about the dissolution of her marriage and finding love again. I liked This Could Be Us, though not as much as I loved Before I Let Go.
I read a lot of books, usually multiple books at the same time, so there are conversations happening in my brain between the books, which don’t usually make it into my final review. I also follow other reviewers on social media, and their thoughts and perspectives become part of the conversation I’m having with myself about the books I’m reading. About the time I was picking up This Could Be Us, I noticed that a couple of reviewers I follow did not consider this book to be a romance. So I read with that question in mind. I bring this up because I think Kennedy Ryan is doing something interesting with This Could Be Us. It’s definitely in a gray area between romance and women’s fiction, and I think a good argument could be made either way. I landed on the romance side.
The romance genre requires two things, the love story is central to the plot and the characters having the romance end with a happily ever after/happy for now. Soledad and Judah are in a loving, committed relationship at the end. I can see why a reader would feel like Soledad and Judah’s love story was not central to the book. Soledad’s focus for a lot of the book is about surviving, protecting her daughters, and healing. The focus of the book though is on getting Soledad and Judah from their messy start as a woman in a bad marriage and the man who is investigating her husband, into a healthy and stable relationship with a blended family. Kennedy Ryan is exploring what it would take to heal from a traumatic end to a marriage and move on to a healthier relationship. This is a theme I’m seeing a lot in contemporary romance with older characters – how do you create mature relationships that serve the person you’ve become through your life experience?
One of the things I find so interesting in contemporary romance right now is the way so many authors are grappling with what it means to be a functioning adult in our world as it exists today (even though most authors ignore the pandemic). There’s both a progressive move away from strict gender roles and the gender binary, and a reactionary push to enforce them more rigidly. What a romantic relationship looks like is less well defined. The economy is-throws hands up in the air and gestures wildly-not at all what my parents and grandparents dealt with. And there’s a greater acknowledgment that as humans we are figuring out who we are at many points in our lives. All of this impacts what the central love story can look like in a contemporary romance.
Soledad has always wanted to make a home for her family, and she wants to be valued for that. Ryan gets into some of the cultural and historical reasons why Soledad, an Afro-Latina, wants her primary work to be in and about the home. Among the many awful revelations at the end of her marriage, she learns that her ex-husband thought less of her for being a stay at home mom even though he benefitted professionally and personally from her labor. Once she becomes her family’s sole support, she turns her homemaking skills into a business as an influencer. She has to adjust the way she focuses on the home to adapt to her change in financial circumstances, but she also has to relearn who she is when she isn’t being made smaller by a partner who uses her. That relearning, rebuilding, and dating herself is an explicit rejection of the idea that she let another man save her. She has to save herself, with help and support, in order for the romance to work.
As a contrast to her ex husband who assumed her role as a wife was to be a dependent homemaker, Judah and his ex-wife have taken turns stay home, or working from home to support their sons, who are autistic. For both Soledad and Judah, a loving and supportive home is one way they buffer their children from the racism, colorism, and ableism in the world. We see the ways they are compatible from early in the book. Judah has smaller growth arc, but even he has to figure out how to make time for himself before he can be a good partner for Soledad.
I think Edward, the ex-husband, is the weak spot in This Could Be Us.
Hendrix gets her romance in the next book and I am very interested to see what kind of romance she will have.
CW: emotional abuse, divorce, arrest on page, incarceration of spouse, awareness of impact of racism and colorism, racism and colorism from family (challenged), ableism from family (challenged), autistic meltdown in public (handled gently), cheating by spouse, betrayal, misogyny (challenged), death of parents in past, cancer on page (survived), injury and hospitalization of child (not serious).
I read this as part of the Diverse Baseline Challenge.
I received this as an advance reader copy from Forever and NetGalley. My opinions are my own, freely and honestly given.