REVIEW: Hitting the Wall by Cate C. Wells
Trigger warning: child rape.
Dear Cate C. Wells,
I picked up Hitting the Wall, the first contemporary romance in your Stonecut County series, because it came highly recommended by commenter DiscoDollyDeb. That it was included with my limited-time free trial membership in Kindle Unlimited made it easy to try; I don’t think I would have paid for it. Hitting the Wall had some things going for it but also some real issues and I quit at 44%.
The first chapter here is essentially a prologue. Shay Crowder, a seventeen-year-old girl, is being railroaded by three men – Mr. Wall, Stonecut County’s most powerful and wealthiest rancher, Mr. Price, a successful businessman and friend of Mr. Wall’s, and the sheriff. This power gap is accentuated by the lollipop Shay keeps palming in her pocket for comfort. The confrontation is happening because she’s pregnant with the hero’s child and she is only seventeen whereas the hero is twenty-four.
Kellum Wall, the hero and Mr. Wall’s son, has no idea that Shay is that young. She had only recently moved to town to stay with her grandpa before the one time they had sex, and an older friend of hers had lied to Kellum about her identity. Kellum was also drunk. He had just broken up with his longtime girlfriend, Elizabeth, who decided she wanted him back shortly after that night.
The sheriff informs Shay that while sixteen is the age of consent in many cases, for a twenty-four-year-old man to have sex with a seventeen-year-old-girl is nevertheless a statutory sex offense and a crime, corruption of a minor. If it were true that it really happened, which of course it isn’t, says the sheriff, it would cost Kellum his job since Kellum is a police officer.
Of course, the sheriff has no inclination to arrest the man he calls a “stellar, up and coming young officer,” and who is also the scion of the town’s wealthiest and most powerful family. The sheriff even rests his hand on the butt of his pistol. But Shay knows that if her pregnancy were to become public knowledge, the sheriff might not have a choice. The scandal would be heard of far and wide and Kellum’s reputation would also be destroyed. Despite the confrontation, Shay doesn’t want that for him. Not only that, but Kellum’s father is Shay’s grandfather’s employer and landlord, so her grandfather, the one member of her family who cares about her, could be fired and evicted if she stays and makes life difficult for Kellum. Reading the writing on the wall, Shay promises to leave.
Mr. Price comes back a little later and gives Shay money for an abortion. Shay leaves the county, but she keeps both the money and the baby. She struggles on her own for seven years, until a day arrives when she can’t pay the rent and she (now twenty-four) is forced to return. Her daughter, Mia, is a little girl of six and she is on the autism spectrum (I don’t feel qualified to judge the quality of the neurodivergence representation in the portion of the book that I read). Shay and her little girl have been living hand to mouth for all these years, but now Shay’s grandfather is dead and though his longtime girlfriend lives in his trailer, Shay hopes she’ll be able to stay there without Kellum’s knowledge. She has no other place to go.
Kellum was aware of none of this. Not that Shay was seventeen, not that she got pregnant (she tried to call him to let him know but Elizabeth was with him and got annoyed, and to satisfy her he cut the call short and blocked Shay’s number), not what his dad, boss and Mr. Price did. Now he is the Deputy Sheriff and no longer with Elizabeth. Driving down a road to investigate a case, Kellum spots Shay and Mia walking by the side of the road carrying laundry on a hot day. He stops and quickly recognizes Shay. He realizes Mia is his because she resembles his (also neurodivergent) sister. Though it isn’t easy, he convinces Shay to let him give them a ride.
Her grandfather’s old trailer is overly hot and unsafe for a child, and when Kellum points this out and asks her to move into his house with Mia, Shay reluctantly agrees because she has few other options. Kellum admires Shay’s backbone and he’s also very focused on getting to know Mia and on keeping her safe and cared for. The latter was one of the few things I liked in him.
Soon after this, Kellum has it out with his family. But though he’s angry at them for all the years with Mia their actions cost him and even hits his brother for telling his father but not him about the pregnancy all those years ago, he doesn’t seem to fully grasp just how horrible his father, the sheriff and Mr. Price’s actions must have been for seventeen-year-old Shay to endure, and he still tries to rationalize it partly away. Kellum’s mom had no idea of all this either and she wants to see her grandchild, but Kellum is afraid that Shay will take Mia and split at the slightest hint of any possessiveness, so he tells his family to back off.
Of course there’s an incendiary attraction between Kellum and Shay. Neither ever felt like this about anyone before the one time they hooked up, and now the feelings come roaring back. Reading about how Kellum had never felt such an astonishing level of attraction as when he first saw Shay or ever had a hotter experience than the one he had that night made me uncomfortable given that Shay was only seventeen then and he was twenty-four.
There are good things to be said for the book. Shay is easy to like, a survivor who knows she doesn’t deserve the treatment she got and who stands up for herself with a combination of dignity and wounded pride. To be sure, it would be hard not to like a heroine who was chased out of town at seventeen while pregnant and had to raise her child in poverty, all the more so when the child has special needs that added to the challenges. But Shay’s scrappiness and her determination to protect herself and Mia add a lot to her characterization too.
Wells is also pretty good at conjuring an atmosphere and portraying a gritty milieu. Wealth inequality is more than subtext here, and it isn’t glamorized. The neglected trailer park, the flip-flops Shay wears, her and Mia’s shabby clothing and the way they carry laundry baskets for two miles without even a water bottle in the heat are contrasted with the comfort Kellum and his family live in, the ranch and horses they own, and the power they hold in their community. All of this might have made me inclined to read on if Shay had been paired with someone other than Kellum. It doesn’t bode well for a romance when the number one thing I dislike about it is its hero.
Kellum had sex with Shay against a tree, even though she was a virgin (which he didn’t notice, natch). He also didn’t think of using a condom until Shay insisted (he had to pull out to put one on). He didn’t notice when the condom broke either. We’re told he meant to make love to her again, more gently, by the river, before an emergency called him away, blah blah blah—so he probably wasn’t even entirely off-duty.
Furthermore, Shay was drunk (at one point, Kellum thinks “I left a naked, seventeen-year-old drunk girl alone by the side of a river.”). Not only could she have stumbled and fallen into the water and drowned, but sex with an intoxicated person is rape, period, no matter how old she is. Even if that wasn’t the law in Kellum’s jurisdiction, it certainly is in other states. Kellum couldn’t have been unfamiliar with this concept. He was sworn to uphold the law.
(Since he’s a police officer, I think it’s also valid to ask if there was there a designated driver who was going to drive him home. I certainly didn’t get that impression.)
Further, if he’s halfway perceptive, as he later shows himself to be (though to be honest, I had a hard time viewing him that way even so because of all that had gone down back in the past), then how could Kellum not have questioned Shay’s age at least a little? There’s no indication in the book that she looked or acted older than seventeen, and while he was told that she was someone’s out-of-town hairdresser cousin, that’s not a guarantee of anything. Pandy, the woman who told him that, was the area’s troublemaker.
The whole thing was discomfiting and it was hard not to squirm when Kellum reflected on how hot it had been. The fact that he hung up on seventeen-year-old Shay and blocked her number when she called and tried to tell him that she was pregnant made it even worse. Shay was still young enough to, when threatened by three men, take comfort from a lollipop.
Then there’s the fact that Kellum’s family has so much while Shay lives on the edge of hunger. The wealthy hero and the down-on-her-luck heroine is, of course, a staple trope, but here it was accentuated by the fact that Shay had nowhere safe to go when she left and no better choices she came back, that she had almost no money and little to eat, that she and her child are too thin, and that she was so young and on her own with a little girl, and a little girl who required special care. The power divide was very wide, and I felt that the author was capitalizing on that power gap.
The fact that Kellum had all these societal, financial, and familial protections bothered me. Wells made it evident that Shay would not have come back to Stonecut County if she had other options, or moved in with Kellum if she’d had other ways to provide Mia with safety. I wasn’t happy to see Shay saddled with him, and his societal, financial, and familial advantages were the means by which this saddling was taking place. They didn’t make him good enough for her. In the 44% I read, Shay never felt forced by Kellum in any way, either as a teen or as an adult, but if she had to choose someone as lackluster as him I wanted her to at least choose him from a position of greater empowerment and strength.
The book is also really slow. Though the first chapter is, like some of the others, wordy and repetitive, the beginning has some momentum. I continued reading because I wanted to see Shay get some emotional justice. But after Kellum’s fight with his family I lost interest. Kellum’s family isn’t particularly interesting or entertaining and in the middle section I got bored.
As readers of this review can probably tell, the romance itself didn’t really work for me because I didn’t like Kellum. I couldn’t help seeing him as someone born with a silver spoon in his mouth, and while he does feel guilty and bad for his actions when Shay was seventeen, I somehow doubt that by the end of the book he turns himself in for corruption of a minor and begins to pay his debt to society. If I hear that I am wrong on that score, I might be a little happier with this book. DNF.
Sincerely,
Janine
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I’m sorry you didn’t like the book more, Janine, but no two people can always like the same books. I loved HITTING THE WALL (it was my first five-star read of 2022). I liked that Wells addressed head on Kellum’s entitlement, which factors into his belief that he would never do anything like “have sex with a 17-year-old virgin against a tree” and his initial disbelief that members of his family drove Shay out of town; and I thought Wells did a great job with showing how Kellum gradually comes to realize how protected he has been by his class, gender, and family wealth and how that has clouded his view of himself and his life. Shay is a survivor and her first commitment is to her child. Her personality doesn’t undergo the same level of evolution as Kellum’s. I find Wells excels at portrayals of imperfect-but-not-irredeemable heroes who want to do better but don’t always have the emotional bandwidth to do so without blunders.
I do want to add that Kellum does not know Shay is 17 when they first meet: her friend has introduced her as an older woman (a hairdresser). Also, I have a daughter who is on the high-functioning end of the autism spectrum and I work in the school system with students who are on the severe end—and I think Wells did a good job with portraying a child on the spectrum who has “selective mutism.”
I read and enjoyed this book though I can’t dispute some of the criticisms you raised, @Janine. Thanks for sharing your thoughts, too, @DDD; it always intrigues me how differently readers can feel about a given book.
@DiscoDollyDeb: I think if it was just one or two mistakes that compounded into this situation I would be able to view Kellum as merely entitled but (1) not realizing Shay’s age, (2) not noticing that she was a virgin (3) forgetting to put on a condom, (4) not noticing the belated condom broke, (5) getting drunk in the first place when he was on call and might have to get somewhere in a hurry, (6) not thinking about the fact that Shay was drunk and how that this factors into both consent and other kinds of safety is a lot. It all combined to make me feel that on top of being entitled he also wasn’t the brightest light in the Christmas tree.
I usually like the kind of emotional journey you describe which is part of why I picked up the book. In many books that kind of journey is satisfying to me and I close the book feeling good about the hero. But this was one of those cases where I feel that true reparation would involve more than the hero falling for the heroine, realizing his wrongdoing and being good to her. I would want to see more signs of his awakening, such as Kellum quitting his job (both to have nothing to do with the sheriff and because he has no business enforcing laws he’s broken while in uniform), breaking with his father and brother on a permanent basis, and, honestly, owning up to his wrong against society and going before a judge. I would be fine with him getting an excellent attorney and serving a reduced or even minimal sentence (particularly if Shay and Mia wanted him in their lives) given that he didn’t know and from the way he is portrayed I’m not too worried about repeat offenses. However, I didn’t get the impression that Wells intended to take his reformation that far. Am I wrong?
(Put a spoiler warning at the top of your comment before replying.)
@DiscoDollyDeb: I think I said all that about Kellum not knowing and the lie that Pandy told him in the review. Is it ever explained why Pandy told him that Shay was a hairdresser (beyond that she was a troublemaker)? I was curious about that.
I also read this one based on DDD’s recommendation (seems like the reason many people have been trying Cate C. Wells), and my take on it is closer to hers than yours, Janine.
Not really spoilers, but as I read it, Kell was not on duty the night he and Shay met, he truly believed her to be older, and it’s not clear if she was drunk; his later perspective is colored by his (justified) guilt over what was done to Shay and his part in it. Having said that, I don’t feel like there was enough of a reckoning with his own culpability, and I too was uncomfortable with how he reflects on their encounter. It also takes him way too long to realize just how naïve he’s been about the power dynamics in his town.
What really makes this book IMO is Shay and the way she stands up for herself and for Mia. It’s very clear how hard that can be given her lack of power and status. The conversation she has with Kell the first night she’s at his house in which she calls him on various bullshit and privileged crap is fantastic.
Now, spoilers spoilers:
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Other than Kell’s truly despicable uncle*, Shay isn’t sure who believed she was pregnant and who thought it was just a rumor. His brother Cash is the hero of Against the Wall, so we get is take on what happened, and he believed it was a rumor and regrets the way he dealt with it at the time (as a teenager – he’s the same age as Shay). I liked his book better; his dickishness is not glossed over, but he grows up and does do better, in his own way. I was honestly shocked that I liked AtW as much as I did, Cash isn’t the kind of character I’d have expected to work for me.
* I think he’s dealt with in Wells’ MC book Heavy, which I have not read.
@Rose: “On duty” is maybe the wrong term, but wouldn’t you say he was on call at least, given that he was called away by an emergency and dropped Shay hastily despite really wanting to make love to her? And strictly speaking, he shouldn’t be having sex with anyone when he’s so drunk that he’s not clear on whether his partner is drunk as well.
I think I might view all this a bit more leniently if he was in another profession but given that he is sworn to uphold the law, to serve and to protect the public in this capacity, and that taxpayer dollars pay him to do that, it feels appropriate to me to hold him to a high standard. He could have gone into a different profession if he didn’t want the responsibility of having to be a good example to the rest of us. The fact that the police can often get away with more instead of less doesn’t make it any less of a betrayal of their commitment to the public when they break the law.
I think that the pacing was a factor in my feelings about him. As I say, I stopped at 44%, and I think a factor is that I felt that his personal journey was taking too long.
There was an additional issue I had that I debated with myself about including in the review because I wasn’t sure if I was articulating it well enough, but I’ll give it a stab now. I feel that Wells was romanticizing or at least eroticizing statutory rape. I got the sense that she wanted us to see it as kind of sexy and as a romantic beginning for the relationship—that however sordid it was, there was enough pull there for something to bloom out of it, and she wanted us to see that from the beginning, from the rape, and to highlight Shay’s youth which makes it clear that it was child rape.
Otherwise why put the lollipop in her pocket and have her reach for it? The only other reason I can think of is if Wells wanted to play up the fact that it’s a very serious crime, but that didn’t seem to be where the book was going. Yes, he was clearly going to come to terms with his privilege, his family, etc. as part of his journey, but was he going to come to terms with the fact that these factors had conspired to aid him in committing child rape and that (however unintentionally) he did indeed take advantage of them to commit it? I didn’t see the book as going *there* (I would have stuck with it if I had). And if that’s not where it was going to go, then the purpose of emphasizing the fact that Shay is still a kid (via the lollipop) is probably to romanticize and/or eroticize what happened.
I agree that Shay is a terrific character.
SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS
Re whether they knew or whether they thought it was just a rumor—regardless, the sheriff and Kellum’s father were out of line. Their actions denied a rape victim justice, denied Kellum five years of his child’s life, denied Shay child support and better healthcare while she was pregnant, denied little Mia a safer upbringing and a full stomach and good disability care, denied the public a sheriff who investigates potential crimes that come to his attention instead of compounding them with more crimes. And even if they believed it was a rumor, they should have taken a moment to consider the alternative — consider all the harm they would be doing if it was the truth. At the very least, Kellum’s father knew that he was railroading the teenaged granddaughter of an elderly employee and potentially harming her (a kid!) in the process, without even checking to see if she had anywhere else to go. Is a rumor, however potentially pernicious, sufficient to make even just that okay?
When taken together these are more than enough reasons for Kellum to cut his father out of his life and to quit his job with the sheriff. They *should* pay a price—otherwise what kind of justice is that for Shay and Mia?
I agree about Cash. I hadn’t realized that he was still a kid when he made those choices.
Unlike Janine, I did finish the book, but was left feeling angry and frustrated. I have enjoyed other books by the author and her heroes do tend to be unconventional and imperfect, but by the end of the book, Kellum had not been redeemed in my eyes and I was hoping that the heroine would just wash her hands of him. He had to be hit on the head so many times by how poorly the town and his relatives were treating the heroine before he got an inkling of his own privilege. Even after he becomes more aware, he doesn’t do enough to make it up to and protect the heroine. I was hesitant to read Against the Wall, but am glad I did because I liked it so much better. Cash is also a flawed hero, but he owned his mistakes and knows his strengths and weaknesses. OTOH, Kellum likes to think of himself as a good guy and I see him as trying to keep the peace and please everyone instead of taking a stand.
@JTReader:
Bingo. I think that was one of the things that most bothered me, actually. His self-talk made it apparent that he saw himself as one of the good guys and I also felt that the author was trying to sell me on that view of him. And that assessment was suspect in my eyes.
I am sorry you had an infuriating and frustrating experience with this book. I think I was getting there when I quit. My frustration was starting to build.
Maybe I should try Against the Wall since you and Rose liked it better.
@Janine: He does realize near the end that he thinks of himself as a good man but isn’t really. But there needed to be more to make things up to Shay. I loved Shay so much that I wanted her to have whatever she wanted, even if it was someone who wasn’t really good enough for her.
As for Against the Wall, you mentioned Tempting the Bride in the other thread: in terms of his relationship to the heroine, Cash starts out as a contemporary redneck version of Hastings, but she is not at all like Helena. Once the opportunity presents itself to use his power for good, he does so, and he’s much more self-aware than his brother. What may bother you is that there is still a lack of accountability from other characters in terms of what was done to Shay.
@Rose: That is good to know. Your statement that there needed to be more to make things up to Shay confirms that I made the right decision in quitting the book partway through. I agree, he wasn’t good enough for her. That makes it all the more important that he make it up to her for the past in every way he can.
Re. Cash’s book, thanks for the information. I will mull it over.
Just in case anyone hasn’t read the Wall Family books yet, the chronological (in terms of the overall story) reading order is: WALL (a Motorcycle Club romance which I enjoyed but, be warned, the hero has been unfaithful to the heroine); HITTING THE WALL; HEAVY (another MC romance with the neuro-divergent Wall sister as heroine); and AGAINST A WALL (which I enjoyed but not as much as HITTING THE WALL). I assume there will be at least one more book about the younger Wall brother and possibly another book about the sculptor friend of the hero of AGAINST THE WALL.
@DiscoDollyDeb: I forgot to say earlier, please don’t worry about recommending a book that didn’t work for me. I always appreciate recommendations. Even when they don’t work for me they may work for other DA readers and that has value in itself. And in your case you were the first person to recommend Heated Rivalry to me and I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it.
@Janine: oh no—I’m never the person who expects everyone to like everything I like. In fact, I read so much dark/mafia/mob/abduction & captivity/Stockholm Syndrome stuff, I’m usually more surprised when someone likes what I like, lol. As the old saying goes, no two people ever read the same book. We bring all our experiences, likes/dislikes, and expectations to every book we start, and what works for one person will not always work for another. I’m sorry HITTING THE WALL was not the right fit for you, but I’m so glad you enjoyed HEATED RIVALRY. I can’t wait for THE LONG GAME.
@DiscoDollyDeb: Ha, I can’t wait until you read The Long Game either. The review is already written and right now our plan is to run it about a week after the book is out so people we’ll have read it and be able to discuss it. We’re planning to run two threads, one for the review, which will be spoiler-free, and another for discussing all the books in the series (including The Long Game) with spoilers included.