REVIEW: Come As You Are by Jess K Hardy
Dear Jess K Hardy,
Ashley Cooke is a 46-year-old divorcee who runs Bluebird Basin ski resort in Montana, with her mother, Maude Alice. Her father passed away three years earlier and it’s been struggle street since then to keep the resort open. She’s under pressure from her skeevy cheating ex-husband, Chuck, who is employed by a wealthy ski resort conglomerate which wants to buy Bluebird Basin. The ethos of Bluebird Basin has always been accessibility and inclusivity – locals and those with not as much money should be able to enjoy the slopes as well. They may not be fancy but they’re not super expensive either. But it’s getting harder and harder to run the resort and resist the pressure Chuck is applying to sell up. When Maude Alice springs an idea on Ashley she’s not initially very keen: Matthew Madigan, 53, former guitarist for 80’s grunge band The Makers and addict-in-recovery, runs “Little Timber” a sober living home. Madigan has met with Maude Alice about his men working the resort for the ski season in return for room and board and a minimal wage. While it’s not the plan Ashley initially had, she can’t really afford to pay proper wages and in the end, she decides to take a chance on Madigan and Little Timber.
Ashley has a complicated relationship with her mother and feels like she has to be the responsible one all the time. Her ex-husband did a number on her head, often belittling or demeaning her, and she’s sensitive about being regarded as stupid or naive because of it. She’s a more than capable woman but she hasn’t had the success her hard work deserves and so it’s easy for her to believe maybe Chuck was right.
Ashley had known for a while in a distant sort of way that her heart had become a vault, fortified with brick walls and barbed wire, barricading everything soft and defenseless safely inside it. She’d never meant to close herself off this way, but those were the parts of her Chuck preyed on the most, her self-confidence, her sense of humor, how much she cared about the people around her—which Chuck still insisted was the reason Bluebird wouldn’t survive with her at the helm. But while Chuck’s words had locked her up, she wondered if maybe someone else’s could become a key. When Madigan saw her weakness, and instead of ridiculing her, thanked her for it, something inside her sprang free, bricks tumbling, barbed wire unwinding.
Madigan and Ashley have an immediate chemistry but it takes a while before they move from friends to lovers. Madigan is worried about whether he will be able to cope with the emotional highs (and possibly lows) of a relationship. He’s been clean for 22 years but sex, drugs, alcohol were all a high for him and he’s a bit scared about one being connected to another. He is wonderfully in touch with his emotions and probably more open than Ashley is at first. He’s done a lot of hard work in his recovery and he’s dedicated his life to helping others succeed in their recoveries too. I enjoyed the banter between the love interests but also the banter between Madigan and the men of Little Timber.
“She finally called you Madigan?” Kev asked, sitting on the edge of his bed, his knee bouncing. “Really?”
“She did.” Madigan didn’t like to almost-kiss and tell, but he needed to talk. He needed his head put back on straight because ever since the chairlift ride everything from his neck up felt like it had slid sideways.
Standing in the bathroom doorway with a towel wrapped around his waist and steam rising from his recently showered skin, Clay said, “Go on.”
“We sort of…” Madigan ruffled his hair. “I don’t know. I was a mess, but there was a moment between us. We leaned in, things got very quiet, and we may have,” he paused, wincing, “tilted?”
“Tilted?” Kev repeated.
“Tilted,” Madigan confirmed.
“Wait,” Kev said. “Both of you? Or just you?”
Madigan scoffed. He might have been out of the game for a minute, but he knew a pre-kiss tilt when he saw one. “There was definite tiltage, from both parties.”
“Okay, but what angle of tilt are we talking here?” Kev asked, his brow furrowed. “Shallow, like a sample-peck? Or like a full-on, I-want-your-tongue-in-my-mouth,” he jabbed his thumb over his shoulder to the book on his nightstand, “romance-book-cover tilt?”
The references to addiction and recovery felt realistic and sensitive, not sugar-coating the impact addiction has on those around the addict or the work needed to try and get clean and stay that way.
For a big tough guy, Madigan is also not too keen on learning to ski but Ashley is persuasive and this is a place where her competence shines and he gets to be vulnerable.
I enjoyed the older protagonists too – as a woman of a certain age, they felt very relatable! And most of the 80s and 90s music references (the non-fictional ones at least) were familiar old friends.
The sex is inventive. It’s a wonderful thing to see a man who knows what he’s doing and who isn’t afraid to take his time and learn what a woman likes. Madigan is exactly the kind of man Ashley needs after the selfish jerk who was her husband and her only previous partner.
The conflict at the end was really the only spot where the story lost a little of my attention. I don’t want to give too much away – it’s not the cause of the conflict itself that was an issue for me, but rather how Madigan and Ashley dealt with it that disappointed me just a titch. However, in the big scheme of things, that’s a very small complaint. Otherwise, Come As You Are was a lot of fun, with a strong vein of emotional resonance running through it.
Grade: B+
Regards,
Kaetrin
I’m not reading a lot of contemporary romance these days, but this sounds very cute and sweet!
Kaetrin, you’ve definitely piqued my interest, so thank you!
Happy day … I see that I already own this!
@Kris Bock: It was a happy surprise for me.
@Kareni: Bonus!!