real quick: first-time caller
A book about a Baltimore where Black people do not exist
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First Time Caller, B.K. Borrison ⭐️⭐️⭐️¾
This book is doing… a lot.
One of the leads, Lucie, is a single mom, formerly a single teen mom, and her baby daddy Grayson, who is married to an ethnically ambiguous man named Mateo, lives next door. She is a mechanic and also tall because to be clear, she’s not like other girls. The other lead, Aidan, is emotionally closed off just because he feels like it—the stakes have never been lower for this man—and also because his mom has had three cancer diagnoses in a 20-year span. While I agree that’s rough, I do think when you have some hot guy with made-up emotional baggage romance-wise, who is also in an apparently neverending grief cycle with his chronically sick mother, that man should at least try to hang out with or talk to the very mother that he cares so much about. But he doesn’t. He talks to her once in this whole book. Not even face to face. But he does have a heart-to-heart with his dad toward the end of the book. And I wondered: does Aidan actually care about his mother? Or just himself? It sure seems like the latter!
That’s a very long-winded way of saying while Aidan has some good qualities, he is also a mopey little bitch. And I say that as the gender-neutral monarch of mopey little bitches.
The novel revolves around Aidan and Lucie collaborating on a romance hotline radio show, where Aidan is supposed to help Lucie find love but instead Aidan pouts until Lucie falls in love with him instead. A classic trope, if you will.
The flirting and the romantic tension in this novel are honestly very good. The ONE SINGULAR SEX SCENE1—a travesty, honestly, I’m begging for crumbs over here—is also pretty good even though as always I wonder why these women characters love just being drilled away at in missionary so much. The relationships Lucie has with her found family are very touching. She leads a very full life while the man she is slowly falling in love with sulks full-time. I guess that’s what some people are into!
Honestly, the most egregious thing is that the novel takes place in Baltimore, but there is only one Black person in the entirety of the book. Now, I don’t expect this work to be full of Black people—I’m guessing that is not the author’s life experience or her intended audience—but it does seem like there could be more than one Black person in these people’s orbits. But actually, you know what, I don’t know these people’s lives, lol. I should be grateful for the radio show’s one DEI hire, whose entire function in the novel is to count down the beginning of the radio show, and who shows up maybe two or three-ish times. I’m not even mad, honestly. It’s not exactly surprising.
So yeah. I rolled my eyes at this more than a little bit, but still found it enjoyable. Today I’m feeling like maybe 3.75/5? But if I were in a better mood, or today was a different day, I might even give it a 4. And yes, this is what it sounds like when I like a work. I did say I was mopey little bitch myself, didn’t I?
Okay, no, there is another “sex” scene but it’s not really sex, it’s just fully clothed dry humping in a literal closet.
I am here for this type of review.
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