REVIEW: Worth the Fall by Claudia Connor
B ReviewsContemporary / Military11 Comments
Dear Ms. Connor:
This was a book I avoided reading despite many recommendations. My general feeling about books with children is that they are overly precious, or too annoying, or both. When I read that the heroine had four children and was pregnant with her fifth, I couldn’t imagine how this book could be romantic. My lack of vision is probably why I’m the reviewer and not the author.
Abby is on a family vacation with her four kids when she meets Matt, a Navy SEAL taking mandatory recovery after suffering a head injury. Matt is anxious to get back to active duty but agrees to play wingman to his cousin at the beach. There he meets Abby who is watching her four kids under the age of six and strikes up a conversation with her young son. Matt is surprised at how attracted he is to Abby who he sees is pregnant, mothering several small children, and alone. The reader, however, has been prepared from page one that Matt is dissatisfied with his single lifestyle and was looking for something serious and more settled but because of his job, he was limited in his options. He had even mentioned to a fellow SEAL that he wanted to leave the service and start a family–a suggestion that was met with shock and horror.
Abby is used to being alone. Her husband was a very successful lawyer and he traveled quite frequently. In some sense she was a single mother for most of her married life. Her husband wasn’t present during the birth of her last child and Abby had to ensure that there was a taxi ready to take her home from the hospital. The death of her husband meant a loss of occasional intimacy but she had been parenting without him.
That said, I was relieved that Matt, the Navy SEAL, was present because the kids exhausted me on the page. They were constantly active, wanting to build sand castles, swim in the pool, or go and eat. Abby (and I as the reader) needed Matt to take some of the burden off of Abby’s shoulders.
It helped that Matt grew up in a big family himself. He was one of the oldest of seven kids—six boys and one girl. Abby’s brood of four with one on the way was nothing compared to the family environment he grew up in. The low key way in which the size of these families were presented made the large families seem ordinary rather than extraordinary. And Matt’s attraction to pregnant Abby was underplayed as well. Abby herself had no real self esteem issues. Her internal angst was more focused on whether she wanted to tie herself to a man who was gone as much as her husband was.
And a man who lived thousands of miles from her North Carolina home. It was the distance and Matt’s career that presented the biggest impediment to the romance, not the children. Matt lost his best friend in an operation over a year ago. Teddy had exhorted himself to not quit. Matt believes that this is a plea for not to leave the SEALs, something that Matt had brought up before Teddy’s death.
The romance develops quite slow but it is perfectly timed for the story. The week that the two meet at the resort is filled with children. There is little time for physical expressions of lust but it was important for the reader to see how well suited Matt was for fatherhood, not just of one child, but of several. It also made the romance believable.
As the romance does progress, however, Matt’s career creates an impossible obstacle. He is torn between the promise he made his dead brother at arms and the promises he’d like to make to Abby and her family. I liked how Abby wasn’t imperiled in any way by being a single mother. She had resources and she enjoyed mothering. That was her calling. I never got the sense that she was fatigued or beat down and needed rescuing. The conflict was primarily Matt’s internal dilemma and whether Abby wanted to risk her secure life for Matt’s uncertain promises and future.
The only problem I had with this story is that I found it unrelentingly gender normative. The girls were princesses and the boys were either jocks or jocks in training. There wasn’t anything about it that was insulting, only that with the four children there is no deviation from the gender stereotypes. The girls enjoyed playing with dolls and dressing up. The oldest child, Annie, was a serious reader. The gender portrayal was very traditional. B
Best regards,
Jane
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I enjoyed this one myself. I thought the romance was well done. I did wish just once for Abby to think,”Why do I have these many kids? Their exhausting.” lol
Sold!
I just loved this book so much and bought it after seeing your tweet about it. I loved that Matt was intensely attracted to Abby. Not in a way where he was attracted only to her mother role, but rather the whole package of her person. You hit on this better in your review but basically, a story well worth reading.
It sounds like you were skeptical but convinced by this story, but I have to admit I’m still skeptical. Abby’s husband can’t have been dead that long if she’s pregnant- wouldn’t she and the kids still be grieving? You say that his death meant the loss of occasional intimacy, but was there nothing more to their marriage?
Maybe this is just my own issue, but I have to admit one of my first thoughts is also “If your marriage is ‘meh’, why would you keep adding kids?” I know that happens plenty in real life, but I think it bothers me more in a romance heroine. Maybe it’s the idea that I’m supposed to believe that she’s invested in having this great relationship with the hero and really making it work despite challenges, and I wonder why she wouldn’t have done that with her late husband.
And what kind of timelines are we talking here? One of my pet peeves in romances where there are kids involved is how fast things move, when in reality I think it’s generally pretty well-acknowledged that it’s a good idea to be wary about bringing a partner into your kids’ lives.
Maybe I’m just bitter and jealous of Abby for seemingly finding parenting 4 kids while pregnant a breeze when I can’t imagine having more than my current two, even with a very involved co-parent. :)
@Lozza: The initial meeting between the two takes a week. Afterwards he flies down a couple times to North Carolina where she lives. I think you have to accept the premise that she was in a loveless marriage and that children provided her a lot of pleasure. I cannot remember how far along she is, but I want to say it’s six months at least. The children’s grieving is subtle. I don’t know how believable it is and I think the author wants you to believe that they are more traumatized by the idea of losing a parent than they are of having lost one already. In other words as Matt grows closer to the children, the fear his broken promises and his departures more than they miss the loss of their father.
This was just my opinion but both of the main characters are catholic and I took their acceptance of large family structure to be a reflection of that. It was made very clear that the biological father (Josh) was the very definition of an absentee parent and when he was around he shied away from any hands on role he might have had (stemming from his own questionable upbringing) And while Abby was portrayed as a competent and loving mother it is noted that she suffered from some (minor) insecurities, mostly revolving around the perception others had of the irresponsibility of having so many children alone. I appreciate the frustration at the stereotypical General roles but it didn’t bother me much, especially because each child’s personality was so different, even along gender lines.
I loved this story! I found it to be a romantic fantasy, as in I can’t believe that in real life a single man would be attracted to a pregnant woman with four children already. But what is a romance novel if not a fantasy with happy endings? I’m really looking forward to the second book in the series that features Matt’s brother.
Worth the Fall was one of my favorite books of this year and like Jane, I have reservations about books with children in them. I agree with Christine, it is a romantic fantasy. I have found myself thinking of the story and characters long after I read and re-read the book.
How did she support herself after her husband’s death? Life insurance. . a job? I’m curious how that was written. . 4 kids and one on the way and a dead husband/father.. kids need money not just love. …
@Sandra: It’s not explicitly stated but I got the sense her husband was well off and she was not hurting for funds after his death so maybe inheritance and life insurance?
Problematic body shape portrayal was present here as well. We have the woman who wants the hero who’s tall, probably slender, and has had work done on her breasts (portrayed in a negative light). She’s compared directly to the smaller woman that the hero wants, who has curves but fine bones, smaller breasts, and a small-by-most-standards belly while heavily pregnant. Then, we have the plump/large women who get into physical accidents with the children. There may be more examples, but I wound up not reading the middle portion of the book at all nor most of the end.
The wannabe girlfriend in the beginning has a “skinny neck” (loc 246) and “man-made breasts– too big for even his large hands” (91); she’s 5’10” (143).
The hero noticed that the heroine’s black tank top that she wore with black bikini bottoms “stretched over her belly” (148) [which sounds physically uncomfortable to me when she’s that pregnant, but if the heroine’s happy, more power to her]. The hero focuses on her “delicate features” (134), though. He makes a direct comparison to how she’s “small, compared to” the wannabe girlfriend (143); we learn later that unlike the wannabe girlfriend, she has “[b]reasts on the small side– barely a C-cup when she was pregnant” (760). The hero additionally focuses on how she was “[a]ll toned legs, tiny ankles, and an ass he was not looking at” (177) and “[b]uilt like a dancer, with small bones and long lines” (loc 246). She has “sexy thighs” (161), “sexy legs” (249) and “sexy curves” (495), though. The hero notes when he kisses her belly (a couple weeks since he’d last seen her), that “she was still small by most standards, but there were changes”; she’s “bigger” (loc 2463). She’s still small by most standards and she’s probably about seven months pregnant. The phrasing does not read as though she’s small for being however pregnant she is.
The bloody accident to one son involved a “big woman” scooting back her chair (loc 1003), while the earlier accident to two of the boys involved a “plump woman” who “plowed into” one of the boys (loc 263). Having said that, both instances did include the boys running in a way that led to or caused the accident.
It’s wonderful that the hero is strongly attracted to the heroine during a time where women’s shapes change and they often feel insecure about their looks. I just wish that it hadn’t come at the expense of other women.