Bingo: work!
hot take bad hurricane preparedness abounds in this book that preaches flying by the seat of your pants and fixing the resultant issues as… independent women being feminist?
Our main characters here are Tansy, a children’s services librarian who becomes the de facto branch manager after a “thousand-year-flood” ruins her Houston area library building, and Jack, a surly gardener and newly promoted Head Director of a botanical garden in the same region. With the library out of commission and half of the staff voluntarily reassigned, Tansy browbeats the local town commissioner into giving her some space in the still-recovering botanical garden to run limited programming for the local area residents. Both are unhappy with each other at first, and then less unhappy, then sexy, then upset by a misunderstanding/mismatch of priorities, then HEA together. For our requisite back stories: Tansy is a single mother with a child (on the spectrum?) and an ex-fiance who skipped out on her and their kid for Reasons. Jack’s ex-wife divorced him when they weren’t able to have a child on account of his infertility issues. Both of our wary bebes have to learn–to let people help them (Tansy) and to open up and love again (Jack).
I don’t have much critique of the cast of characters (quirky librarians and interchangeable horticulture interns named Madison) or the overall plot. In particular, I appreciated that these adults admitted rather quickly that their whole “we’ll just do the horizontal tango for a week and get it out of our system and then go back to life as normal” was a facade and that they wanted to try for a real relationship, whatever that means for them.
But I really struggled with Tansy’s definitions of “independence” and “okay parenting,” and how we’re meant to be on her side. For most of the book, she’s living in a shell of a house on account of not having purchased floodplain insurance on account of not knowing you have to (…okay). Every so often she admits that sleeping on a shared air mattress and cooking on a hot pot and not having a hot water heater doesn’t count as “secure,” but she writes it off as temporary and fine for now and continually rebuffs attempts by her ex-fiance to give her money.
So, yes, I think I’m annoyed by this book simply because Tansy hasn’t figured out a proper child support agreement. It’s not “being rescued” to receive the money that your child’s parent is legally obligated to provide to you for the care and keeping of his child! She’s basically depriving her kid of a more secure existence for her own pride, which just raises my hackles.
At least she’s consistent, and unwilling to simply roll over and get absorbed into playing house at Jack’s. That desire for independence I could get more behind, especially because you know the epilogue will reveal (and it does) that they’d eventually move in.