Crazy Stupid Bromance
The Bromance Book Club series delivers its third volume with Crazy Stupid Bromance, a best friends-to-lovers, hacktivist-meets-cat-loving café-owner romance.
Computer security technician and ex-teen hacktivist Noah Logan is trying to be the best man possible for his friend Mack (hero of the previous in the series, Undercover Bromance), but the interminable number of wedding activities he’s been subjected to – including being forced to learn an interpretative dance for the ceremony – is pushing his patience to the breaking point. He’s equally resistant to the notion of being enlisted in the Bromance Book Club, though all of his friends swear by it.
Noah’s best friend, Alexis Carlisle, runs the Toe Beans Cat Café and is trying to cope with the international press attention she’s getting after being one of dozens of women who accused celebrity chef Royce Preston of sexual harassment. The fame has gotten the café some notoriety, and when she notices a sad-looking customer coming into the café, the social Alexis approaches her and tries to engage her in a conversation. She gets a shock when the customer, who introduces herself as Candi, explains they are half-sisters, and their father – who abandoned Alexis when she was a baby – will die without a new kidney.
Cue Noah stepping in, concerned that Alexis’ biological father Elliott Vanderpool might be trying to take advantage of her. When Alexis asks Noah to dig into Vanderpool’s past, he discovers that his company is an enormously wealthy defense contractor whose negligence resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians. He also finds out that Vanderpool was engaged to another woman – the mother of his other children – while he was involved with Alexis’ mother. Noah’s hacktivist side is back with a vengeance, but he has an even deeper secret.
For Noah wants nothing more than to convince his BFF that they belong together. Some things cannot be found in coding and wires. Bromance Book Club to the rescue!
Crazy Stupid Bromance is a very cute story with a soap opera subplot that doesn’t really work all that well amidst the froth. But the warm relationship between Noah and Alexis pulls the book through.
Alexis is the best. No doormat but also not the least bit wicked, it’d be easy to reduce a character like her to her victimhood status, but she bounces back, alive and sassy, and Noah, the introverted computer geek who just kinda wants to be alone with his girl, is a great hero because he’d do absolutely anything for Alexis.
His love for Alexis and vice-versa feels so real that one senses that, even if the romance didn’t work out, they’d still be best friends. Their bond is moving, sensual and compelling.
There are a lot of great secondary characters – chief among them, besides the other members of the BBC, are Beefcake, Alexis’ ginormous cat, who HATES Noah and it’s kind of hilarious. Candi is super sympathetic as well.
The biggest problem I had with the book is that the whole kidney transplant plot – with its billionaire dad and dramatic affair and attendant silliness – feels extremely outré when placed against the much quieter and smaller romance happening in the main part of the novel. Without it, the simple story of Alexis’ sexual harassment plot and the Noah’s wooing of Alexis would have been enough of a storyline.
But that isn’t quite enough to put a dent in my recommendation. Crazy Stupid Bromance works as a romance, and in that it is pretty successful.
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Lisa Fernandes is a writer, reviewer and recapper who lives somewhere on the East Coast. Formerly employed by Firefox.org and Next Projection, she also currently contributes to Women Write About Comics. Read her blog at http://thatbouviergirl.blogspot.com/, follow her on Twitter at http://twitter.com/thatbouviergirl or contribute to her Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/MissyvsEvilDead or her Ko-Fi at ko-fi.com/missmelbouvier
Book Details
Reviewer: | Lisa Fernandes |
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Review Date: | October 27, 2020 |
Publication Date: | 10/2020 |
Grade: | B |
Sensuality | Warm |
Book Type: | Contemporary Romance |
Review Tags: | Bromance Book Club series |
I did get books 1 and 2 from the library rather than buying them, but I enjoyed them more than the reviewers, I think. I am on the wait list for this book.
I liked the meta commenting on tropes that the author could do through the discussions the book club has. For example, in book 2, The club was reading romantic suspense with an enemies to lovers trope and so the action of the book mirrored that. Yes, the whole stakeout at the end was cray-cray, but so are a lot of romantic suspense plots!
The meta discussion of romance writing and tropes within contemporary romances maybe deserves its own blog post. I have run into it a lot, especially with some of the comtemps where the heroine is a librarian or author or librarian/author, as well as in this series.
The meta trope discussion really is one of the best parts of the book.
I listened to books 1&2 and my basic reaction to both books has been the same – good ideas but lacking in execution. The premise is n the first book was pretty creaky and the heroine in the second was really hard to like. Those weren’t the only issues, but they’re the ones that have stuck with me.
I feel like the series has a problem with overplotting, but that just might be my interp.
No, I agree – plotting is a problem. And you know, the cynic in me wonders if the author intended the first book as a one-off. The structure of the book-within-a-book hasn’t been re-used, but was one of the most successful and unique elements of The Bromance Bookclub. There’s been no attempt to do that again, and that’s a shame.
It’s kind of a situation where it’s not enough for the hero and heroine to be fighting – there needs to be a sideplot where her father is secretly in large with the mob or the like. Simplification would help a lot.
I did like the little excerpts of the novel Noah was reading being sprinkled throughout the book in this one.
Aww man. That was the main reason I wanted to read it them. I loved the whole book within a book thing. I probably won’t finish the series now.
Yeah, sorry, but that structure seems to have been a one-off.
If you like romantic suspense and haven’t read Sandra Brown’s Envy, I recommend it as a great book within a book plot. I especially love it on audio narrated by Victor Slezak. This was one book I immediately made my husband listen to after I did and he loved it, too.
I skimmed a lot of book two (about 1/3 at least, if not half) and am reluctant to read this.
I read your review above to say that the non-romance plot here has similar problems as in book 2, where it just did not work well, did not show the H/h in a good light, and weakened the book.
However, as opposed to the never ending bickering of H/h in book 2, here, they are sweeter so the romance itself is more enjoyable.
Would that be about right?
I am very much on the fence, whether to let this series go, or not.
I adored the premise, the guys reading romance novels as a kind of like “how-to” books, but book 2 was bad…
The romance in 3 is bickering-light, if that helps at all!
My best advice is to try it out at the library and see how it works for you.
Thx!
I had some mixed feelings about the second book and the first book didn’t do that much for me on the second reading, but it’s just IMO that it’s the best of the series.