The Bromance Book Club by Lyssa Kay Adams

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Title: The Bromance Book Club
Author: Lyssa Kay Adams
Series: Bromance Book Club #1
Published by: Penguin Audio
Release Date: November 5, 2019
Format: Audiobook
Narrator: Andrew Eiden, Maxwell Caulfield
Length: 9 hours and 9 minutes
Genres: Contemporary, Romance, Sports Romance
Source: Libby
Reading Challenges: Lenoreo's 2023 Audiobook Challenge, Lenoreo's 2023 Backlist Reader Challenge, Lenoreo's 2023 COYER Chapter 1, Lenoreo's 2023 Diversity Reading Challenge
Find it: Goodreads ✩ Amazon ✩ B&N ✩ Google ✩ Kobo ✩ IndieBound ✩ iTunes ✩ Book Depository ✩ Libro.FM
My rating:

Blurb:

The first rule of book club: You don't talk about book club.

Nashville Legends second baseman Gavin Scott's marriage is in major league trouble. He’s recently discovered a humiliating secret: his wife Thea has always faked the Big O. When he loses his cool at the revelation, it’s the final straw on their already strained relationship. Thea asks for a divorce, and Gavin realizes he’s let his pride and fear get the better of him.

Welcome to the Bromance Book Club.

Distraught and desperate, Gavin finds help from an unlikely source: a secret romance book club made up of Nashville's top alpha men. With the help of their current read, a steamy Regency titled Courting the Countess, the guys coach Gavin on saving his marriage. But it'll take a lot more than flowery words and grand gestures for this hapless Romeo to find his inner hero and win back the trust of his wife.

My Review:

3.5 stars — Well shit, picky Lenore strikes again.  I wonder if it didn’t help that I had such high expectations for this book, since everyone I know really loved it and was wowed by it, but it just fell short for me unfortunately.  Which is not to say it was a bad book, it just wasn’t the grand slam that it was for many others.

For some reason I just felt my nit-pick-o-meter turn on over and over again while listening to this book.  There was the fact that for the first half of the book, the only interactions we really see between Gavin and Thea are contentious and acrimonious.  It’s kind of hard to fall in love and root for characters who we constantly see at their worst.  In the end I think I grew to like both of them, but I wasn’t really in love.

Gavin was so full of pride and hurt, it was hard not to want to smack him.  He made some terrible choices before the book starts, and keeps putting his foot in his mouth for quite awhile afterwards.  Even with friends who seem to want to help, he resists and definitely shows signs of what I think of as stupid masculinity…a smaller subset of toxic masculinity that isn’t quite as bad, but is still really annoying and not very endearing.  Even the boys in the group showed a bit of stupid masculinity at times, though they were all trying and I very much appreciated that.

The thing is that Gavin, though very slowly for my tastes, eventually does learn and grow.  It would have helped him open up if one of the other book club gents had shown a little vulnerability and shared their own stories with him…they were expecting an awful lot without giving in return.  For some reason that really annoyed me.

And then we have Thea.  I really loved the spunk that she eventually shows and gets back over the course of the book, and I appreciate the struggle she faced unlearning lessons from her childhood.  The problem with her storyline is that she’s a VERY SLOW LEARNER, doesn’t even realize she has her own growth story, and resists at every turn.  It doesn’t help that the one other female friend she has is her sister who has the same trauma, and thus holds her back over and over.  I was very disappointed in the lack of “good WAGS”, other than a teensy bit from Nessa.  I desperately wanted more for her.

Then we have the two of them together.  Like I said, there’s not much to love in the first half.  I mean, I’m not even sure I know what Thea fell in love with on her side, other than great forearms and other physical attributes.  What was it about Gavin’s personality that drew her in?  Then again, there were great moments where they read together, but I just wanted more there.  I was also disappointed that there wasn’t much of a conversation over the big O problem…at least not an explicit one.

As a totally weird stupid side note, there is a tiny throwaway line in the first half where Mac tells Gavin he wouldn’t want to get fat eating his big breakfast (as though Thea wouldn’t love him anymore if he did), and then he even puffs up his cheeks at him like a child.  That kind of fatphobic bullshit just really turns me off, and I was NOT impressed.

So yeah.  Not a bad book, but I was really looking for more.  I’m definitely skipping Mac’s book, but I might try another book in the series and see if I have better luck.

COYER Community: I buddy read this book with Brandee, and while she enjoyed it more than me, at least she wasn’t on the 5 star side with me bringing her down.  She gave it 3.5 stars rounded up, see her review here.