I spent two weeks traveling earlier this month and decided a hefty 450-page romance would be an excellent choice to keep me company on planes and in hotel rooms. I was very right. I have spent the past three years adding Kate Canterbary books to my to read list thanks to a review by emmalita of The Worst Guy. Unfortunately for me, her books aren’t available through my library system so when I came across a sale, I decided that In a Jam would be the one I started with. It then sat on my bookshelf for over a year while it waited for me to get my proverbial act together and read it. But here we are, with my act together and a 4.5 rounded up star rating for a book I enjoyed while navigating international travel.
The thing that I think best sums up my reading experience of In a Jam is that while I was reading it I kept recounting the plot to my friend who I was traveling with the way you would fill someone in on the latest goings-on of extended friend and family groups. She was enjoying my mini recaps enough that she added it to her TBR, which is a win.
The story focuses on Shay, and we meet her as her fiancé cancels their wedding day-of. Thankfully she has a strong friend group and is recovering from this upending of her life while staying at her best friend’s apartment (on the couch) when her step-grandmother’s will catches up with her and she is informed that she will inherit the family tulip farm if she lives there for more than 50% of the next year, and gets married. Shay sees no reason to suspect that she will be able to fulfill those terms, but decides to take a sabbatical from her teaching job to spend a year in Friendship, RI to seal in some memories of what had been one of the few stable places in her turbulent childhood before the property is transferred to the town.
Because this is a romance, she runs into Noah Barden. They were friends for the two years she spent in Friendship and he finds himself face to face with the one that got away as it were, but he has enough to focus on with raising his niece Gennie following her mother’s incarceration, and running the family business which has expanded as more and more family farms need to be rescued. He also doesn’t know what to do with the feelings for Shay that have never really gone away, or the new ones that build on top of them as she helps him get Gennie ready to move onto first grade after she is expelled from summer school which was the only guarantee that she would be able to move up.
From there we get a marriage of convenience, second chance friends to lover’s slow burn romance which doesn’t shy away from the messy realities of these people’s lives. Canterbary weaves in the backstory of Noah and Shay as well as who they have been in the fifteen years since they were last together. Gennie is never a plot moppet, her character is handled with details that align with what her experience would have been with her mother, in foster care, and as she comes to terms with living with Noah and her attachment to Shay. Noah and Shay work hard to protect Gennie from what is happening between them since there is a built-in expiration date, and it is honored in the character actions even when they struggle with the very real feelings that are turning their marriage of convenience into the real thing.
There are fun flourishes like never using Shay’s ex-fiancé’s name until just the right moment, and how implicitly queer the world of the book is. Canterbary establishes that Shay is fat, and Noah was as a teenager, and both are annoyed with how people treat Noah since his body transformed. We are also spared the third act break-up as Canterbary releases the tension in another way (there is an intense conversation that looks like it is heading for a break-up but is subverted expertly). This wasn’t perfect, Shay’s self-consciousness about being lovable became a little one note but it didn’t bother me enough to round down, but I could see where others might feel differently about it.
I bought In a Rush as soon as I got home from traveling and hopefully it arrives soon.
Bingo Square: School. Shay is a teacher, she tutors Gennie, and her friend group is based in the school she teaches at. She also must decide about returning to kindergarten and her old school or moving to another grade and school in Friendship while she’s substituting. There is also flirting via sending teenagers to help set up a new classroom, which is excellent flirting.