REVIEW: The Shameless Hour by Sarina Bowen
B- Reviewscollege students / Contemporary / Latino / NA / New Adult / slut shaming4 Comments
Dear Ms. Bowen,
Readers of The Understatement of the Year met Bella in that book. Bella is a senior at Harkness College and team manager for the school’s hockey team. Bella has also slept with several members of the hockey team. What I loved about Bella in The Understatement of the Year was how totally unabashed she was about sex. She was totally at home in her own skin and when the hockey player she’d been seriously crushing on (and occasionally hooking up with) turned out to be in love with one of his teammates, my heart broke for her.
The Shameless Hour introduces us to Rafe, a sophomore at the college. Rafe comes from a religious Dominican family and hasn’t had opportunities for sex with either his high school girlfriends (brought up in similarly religious families) or with his longtime college girlfriend Alison, who thus far hasn’t seemed interested. However, they are finally planning to do the deed on their birthdays, which fall on the same day, when another guy beats Rafe to Alison’s door and says he was her summer fling.
A heartbroken Rafe comes back to his dorm room but both his roommates are getting it on, so he sits in the stairwell in his dorm with the bottle of champagne he had bought for celebrating with Alison. And that is how Bella finds him. They go to her room where one thing leads to another, and Bella takes Rafe’s virginity without ever realizing that he was a virgin. Afterward, Rafe feels ashamed of the way he’s treated her and of indulging in a casual hook up, so he hightails it out of there, which makes Bella feel rejected.
Rafe later tries to make it up to Bella by asking her out to dinner but by then she’s not interested in him anymore. She even hooks up with a frat boy, Whittaker, who turns out to be a real asshole, and who gives her an STD. After seeking treatment for the latter, Bella womans up and informs Whittaker, and he repays her good deed with a horrible one.
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Rafe is there for Bella when she feels shamed. They are in a class study group together and he uses that as an excuse to check on her and make sure she’s eating enough and later, he gets her to leave her dorm room, where she’s been hiding from the world. The two become friends, and eventually, both want more. But Bella doesn’t do relationships — she’s been badly burned by them twice in the past — and Rafe doesn’t do casual hook ups. Can these two find a way to be together? And will what happened to Bella be avenged?
Earlier this month, Kaetrin reviewed The Shameless Hour and gave it a grade of A-. While I also enjoyed the book a great deal, I felt ambivalent about some aspects of it, so my grade for it won’t be as high.
I find your voice almost irresistible, and I don’t know if I could dislike anything you write. The Shameless Hour was incredibly readable. I love Bella – let me say it again: I love Bella – and therefore I was very invested in her fate.
I really liked Rafe, too. He was very mature for his age and had a sense of responsibility that I appreciated. I also appreciated his Dominican background, and though it might have been nice to have a bit more about soccer, his sport of choice, in the book, I liked that not much was made of his being a jock. Instead the focus was on his work at his mother’s family restaurant and his striving to succeed at school.
It was nice to have a gender role swap, with the heroine as the sexually experienced, one might even say rakish one, and the hero virginal and preferring a committed relationship to casual hook ups.
With all that said, I did have some issues with the book.
Bella’s utter unashamedness is what makes her such a great character. To see her feel ashamed was really heartbreaking and I wondered if we needed to go there. She was no less heroic before that happened to her, and I would have rather seen her stay unabashed about her sexuality even as she fell in love.
Second, the plot reminded me a lot of that of your novella, Blonde Date, because in both narratives we have a sexually adventurous heroine being made to feel scared and unsafe by a fraternity misdeed, but then the sweetness and support of the virginal hero helps her heal. Even though the characters differ, the storylines are similar, and that made me feel like I knew where this one was going.
Third, even though I liked Rafe, and felt he was a true friend to Bella, I just didn’t feel this couple as much as the couples in earlier books. I didn’t feel strong romantic chemistry there, or get a sense of what it was that Bella and Rafe had in common. Rafe was great for Bella during a tough time in her life, but I wondered if they would have gotten together if the horrible incident hadn’t happened.
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I agree with Kaetrin’s point that the justice Bella gets feels insufficient. There is another development later on in the book and I felt that did more to even the scales, but I wanted even more.
I am looking forward to a book about Bella’s reclusive neighbor, Lianne, because as a young movie star she has an interesting background.
I had a great time reading this book and when it comes to grading it, I have to reiterate that I love Bella’s character. It is so rare to see a heroine like her in any kind of romance that even though I have some qualms about where the plot took her, I’m giving this book a B-.
Sincerely,
Janine
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This is timely – I just read this yesterday and I loved it. Loved, loved, loved it. But I agree with your reservations.
I really liked Rafe and Bella individually, and I really, really wanted them to get together. But I don’t see them as a forever couple because they’re too different – I’m not mentally turning their hfn into an hea – and I think that’s ok for NA, but it means that the ending didn’t feel quite as strong as some of the others in this series.
I was also upset about Bella losing her job as team manager. And I didn’t totally buy her last minute career decision. It seemed kind of out of the blue. And I have trouble imagining her parents accepting it.
I didn’t notice this until I read your review, but there is an element here of making the heroine really pay before she gets her hfn (what’s the right term for this? Heroine bashing? Shaming? Degrading? Whatever it is that SEP does to her poor embittered heroines) that I intensely dislike in other romances. It would be really nice to have a self confident, unapologetically sexually active heroine who doesn’t have to pay a price for it.
@cleo:
I had a very similar reaction to that. If I were grading purely based on how much I enjoyed it, I’d give this book at least a B.
That’s a good point that an HFN in an NA novel doesn’t need to have long-term potential.
I’m glad you brought it up, because I felt the same way. In fact, earlier on, I kept hoping that Bella would go into sports psychology, or if not that, then physical therapy. Something that would allow her to work with athletes. I think she would have been good at either of those jobs *and* loved them, whereas her ultimate career choice seemed like an odd fit, mostly there for the purpose of leaving her at Harkness another year, so that her relationship with Rafe could continue even though she was a senior.
Agreed. It wasn’t as pronounced as in SEP books, but esp. after Blonde Date, it’s starting to feel like a pattern. At one point Bella says to Rafe that if she becomes his girlfriend, people will say she’s been redeemed. I thought that was an example of what’s known as lampshade hanging, and it didn’t entirely succeed in making the “redemption”-via-trauma trope unobtrusive.
I liked this book a lot. I’ve been in a reading slump of a couple months now where almost nothing holds my attention but this one did the trick. I liked the reversal of roles. Bella was just like a rake in a traditional romance and Rafe was the innocent miss. Great stuff!
@Kim W: I find Sarina Bowen’s books compulsively readable. Even when I have issues, like I did with this one, I inhale the book and barely make time to put it down. They are great books to read during a slump.