REVIEW: Brooklynaire by Sarina Bowen
Dear Sarina Bowen:
Reading the first three books in the Brooklyn Bruisers series I’ve become increasingly aware of something going on in the background of each story between the owner of the Bruisers, Nate Kattenberger, and the team’s cute and spunky office manager, Rebecca Rowley. The timelines of the books overlap, which I kind of like – you get to see little bits of the other relationships play out in each book, almost like Easter eggs. After finishing the last book, Pipe Dreams, I started to get excited about the Nate/Rebecca book, in part because I don’t think I’ve ever read a book with a nerdy tech billionaire as the hero (let’s face it, truly nerdy romance heroes are a rarity).
Seven years before the present-day story, Rebecca has to drop out of college following her father’s unexpected death. Her mother and younger sister need her as a breadwinner; Rebecca is the responsible one. Her sister, who is staying with Rebecca along with her newborn son and baby daddy in the present, is flaky. (The mother, oddly, never gets mentioned again, that I can recall.)
Anyway, Rebecca, desperate for a job, any job, goes for an interview at a tiny startup in Brooklyn. There she meets Nate in all his distracted-genius, geeky, man-child glory. He hires her on the spot as an office manager, and off we go.
Over the years leading up to the present, Nate hits it big (really big) in the tech industry, and Kattenberger Technologies becomes a billion-dollar company. Nate buys a hockey team, the Brooklyn Bruisers, with some of his hard-earned money, and moves Rebecca over to manage operations with the team. She doesn’t know that it’s because he’s developed an inconvenient attraction to her, and wants her out of his everyday sphere. Becca is somewhat hurt by the move though she ends up loving working for the team. Nate in turn doesn’t know that Rebecca once crushed on him as well, though this was earlier in their association, when he had a fiancee.
Back in the present day, Becca has sustained a concussion by falling on the ice at the rink, and this, finally, is the catalyst for Nate and Becca’s relationship to move forward. He is obviously concerned and extremely solicitous towards her, arriving at her apartment with flowers and orders that she take off the full two weeks recommended by the emergency room doctor.
But Becca doesn’t recover in the expected timeframe, and she becomes frustrated and scared. She doesn’t know what’s wrong with her and it’s driving her crazy that she’s not yet cleared to return to work, especially as the Bruisers are in the NHL playoffs. Nate arranges to have her see an expensive and highly-sought specialist, who is able to figure out what’s wrong with Becca and form a treatment plan.
Nate also unilaterally decides that Becca needs a break from the chaos at her apartment – her sister, sister’s boyfriend and their young baby have really taken over the place. His solution is that she stay with him at his mansion in Pierrepoint Place in Brooklyn Heights. (As an aside, the mention of mansions in Brooklyn sent me down a rabbit hole looking for information on the area; I don’t associate Brooklyn with mansions. One of the mansions I found had a sale price of $40 million! I live in the SF Bay Area and even I was shocked at that price.)
Becca agrees to stay even though she feels weird about it. The two grow closer and though Becca begins to feel her crush rekindling, she still doesn’t seem to realize that Nate has feelings for her. That is, until a trip to a charity event in Florida changes everything.
Brooklynaire is what I’d call a low-conflict book, and those don’t always work for me. There aren’t any real reasons Nate and Rebecca don’t get together in the time between him breaking up with his fiancee (he walks in on her in flagrante delicto with a guy she meets at the gym) and the time they actually do get together. His main concern is ruining their friendship, but that doesn’t really seem like a strong enough fear to keep him from making a move for years. Especially when he’s depicted as an aggressive, decisive businessman.
Becca has greater insecurities – Nate’s friendship, her job, and the belief that he’s in some way too good for her, since she’s just a lowly office manager who never finished college and he’s the brilliant (and very, very wealthy) Nate Kattenberger. Still, the book never succeeded in making me forget that there really weren’t any substantial issues keeping them apart.
Which doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy Brooklynaire. The writing is smooth and the cast of characters is familiar in this, the fourth book; I’ve grown fond of many of them. (Though my favorite new character was not human: it was Bingley, Nate’s prototype for an Alexa-style electronic assistant. At times it was hard to believe Bingley wasn’t at least a little bit sentient.)
I am not a huge hockey fan (it’s baseball first, then basketball, for me), but the descriptions of the games held my interest. The Brooklyn setting is appealing too, as it’s been in all of the books.
I really liked Becca. I called her “spunky” earlier, and while that’s not always a good thing (I can’t even see the word without thinking of Lou Grant in “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” – am I dating myself with that mention?), it fits Becca and it is a positive descriptor here. I believe (but haven’t checked) that in earlier books she was portrayed as being a little more unconventional – brightly dyed hair, etc. In Brooklynaire there’s less of that, which I found slightly disappointing. She’s short and curvy; I got the sense she’s supposed to be more cute-pretty than beautiful-pretty. She’s very good at her job and beloved by the Bruisers players. She’s pretty happy with her life before her concussion, so it didn’t feel like a character that needed to go on a long journey in order to embrace love in the end. As noted previously, her only real conflict is accepting that she and Nate have a vast power and money differential. And while it *is* a conflict for her, it’s not one that really resonated strongly for me.
Nate was a little bit trickier – I felt like his character was inconsistent, or perhaps something was missing in his backstory. He describes himself on several occasions as socially awkward, but he’s 95% aggressively normal, especially for a brilliant billionaire. He’s a pretty simple, straightforward guy (he even describes himself in similar terms once or twice). The 5% “socially awkward genius” is mostly just him getting distracted by an idea in the middle of a conversation the way creative types are often depicted as doing. His emotional intelligence is probably better than average for a romance hero, honestly.
It’s not that I had a problem with Nate; it’s just that I felt like the edges that made him (and to a lesser degree Becca) interesting and different were blunted a bit in Brooklynaire. I expected a nerdy hero and a quirky heroine. The characters (again, Nate more than Becca) felt a bit watered down.
My grade for Brooklynaire is a straight B.
Best,
Jennie
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It sounds like both characters are somewhat more mainstream in this book than in the earlier ones. I’m not sure I’m keen on reading that, especially in a low-conflict book.
This sounds a bit like secondary romance syndrome. In most books I’ve read that feature a secondary romance, the secondary romance is far more interesting than the main one, perhaps because the author feels there’s nothing to lose by taking risks. (I remember a historical romance in which the do-gooding gentlewoman heroine collected orphans and prostitutes in her household, as these types of characters do. The love that developed between one of the prostitutes and one of the orphans was more moving by far than the main romance, about which I can remember absolutely nothing.)
Anyway, if the secondary romance is only hinted at so as to feature as the main course in its own book, the things that made those characters different and tantalising often seem to be toned down when they have to carry the book on their own. And readers of the whole series are usually disappointed, so I don’t know why authors do this.
Case in point: I lost interest in this series after Hard Hitter, which I found inconsistent and unconvincing as a romance, but I thought I might still read Nate and Becca’s book, because tantalising hints, etc. Seems like the secondary character uniqueness has duly evaporated and there’s nothing special about this one after all…..
@oceanjasper: I haven’t read the book you describe, but I am well-familiar with this syndrome.
Thanks for the review, Jennie. I’m looking forward to reading this and seeing if my thoughts align with yours.
@Janine: Yeah, I really wish they had been allowed to keep their unusual edges, but there wasn’t a lot of evidence of those in this book.
@oceanjasper: I think that’s a great observation – I’ve definitely read a few series where the secondary characters’ background romance/flirtation/whatever made me think, “Oh, their book is gonna be GREAT!” and then…it isn’t. I think for me it’s one or both of two things going on: 1) having more set expectations going into a book, which may not align with what the author actually wants to do with the characters; 2) authors pulling punches when the characters are actually the h/h (examples: wicked historical anti-hero becomes much less wicked in his book; contemporary heroine who has a reputation but it turns out to be overblown or all a misunderstanding). Either way, it’s disappointing!
@Kareni: Thanks! Let me know what you think when you do read it!
The odd thing to me is that in the previous Brooklyn Bruisers books, it seemed obvious that Nate cared about Becca but that Becca was unaware of Nate’s feelings. Suddenly we learn that she’s always had a crush on him. That doesn’t seem to tie in with the previous books (although I read them some time ago, so perhaps I’m misremembering). Also, why give Nate a fiancée only so he can discover her with another men? Seems like a case of “you’re not like other women” syndrome—done exclusively so that Becca can shine more brightly in Nate’s regard.
And I totally agree with the comment about “secondary character syndrome”. I’ve had a number of disappointments in that regard. Right now I’ve been waiting for ages for the story of one secondary couple in Jackie Ashenden’s Texas Bounty series. I’ve probably waited too long and when the book is finally published, I’ll undoubtedly feel let down, no matter what Ashenden does with them.
I liked the book – better than the one before it, at least, although none of the books in this series really measure up to my favorites in The Ivy Years (most of which ended up on my virtual keeper shelf).
Speaking of secondary characters (well, more of “featured extra”) I thought the story of Nate’s previous fiancee was one of those things that worked really well in the book. I didn’t think of her as a plot device, because the crash of their relationship seemed to be a casualty of Nate’s success…. the fiancee had been his college sweetheart, slightly overweight, who had only started going to the gym because she wanted to measure up to their new lives. She came across as insecure, not as evil/witch… and the glimpse we got of her current life made me wonder if she might be being set up as potential sequel bait.
I live in Brooklyn, and perhaps the most impressive thing about this book and the series is how genuine the issue of housing was for all of the characters. Also, in this particular book the mansion on Pierrepoint Place in Brooklyn Heights was immensely evocative. Brilliant touch, when majority of ‘fabulous housing’ in NY is dated and out of touch.
@DiscoDollyDeb: To be fair, my perception was that Becca had once had a crush on Nate but was mostly over it by the time the main story takes place. It’s only when she realizes that he’s interested in her that her feelings are rekindled.
@KarenF: The only thing that didn’t work for me with Nate’s fiancee (I agree her subplot was otherwise well done) was how little he seemed to care about the betrayal and the breakup. I dunno, maybe he was a mess and it just wasn’t shown, but it felt like he bounced back super-quick. But that’s part and parcel with my issue with the book – a certain superficiality in characterization when it really would’ve served the story to go a little deeper.
@Nora: The Brooklyn setting really is great, although sometimes I feel a bit like the characters are the sort of white-outsider-wealthy folks that long-time Brooklynites decry.
Like oceanjasper, I checked out of this series after Hard Hitter. It’s not as good as Bowen’s other work (both the Ivy Years and True North), I don’t really care about hockey, and the Brooklyn Bruisers don’t operate like a professional sports franchise – one of my pet peeves with sports romances is when authors clearly love the sport but don’t get the organizational side of it.
This doesn’t sound like the book that will persuade me to jump back in. Less hockey, more apple farming please!
The setup in this book bothered me a lot. The story goes: a woman walks into a tech startup. They are all guys and geniuses (because women like that don’t exist). She is hired as their office manager and but is denied stock options because these are “not for clerical help”. She sticks with them through thick and thin, they value her so much… Now 7 years later they all made it big through their stock options, the hero is a billionaire, and the heroine is struggling to pay her bills and worrying about rent increases. And she is moved into a different job with no explanation because her boss is attracted to her. She agonises over what she perceives as expulsion from the inner circle and what she did wrong and other people comment that the new PA was “promoted over her”.
This is basically “discrimination in tech industry 101”. It happens, quite a lot, so it is very real. But the book makes it seem like it is normal and expected: the heroine thinks that all those men are geniuses and she is not worth much, she also muses that even though she struggles there are advantages to having “normal life” compared to the wealth that the guys have accumulated. That is not romantic at all. If the hero was a real hero, then, well, maybe he made a mistake with those stock options early on. And she didn’t negotiate, happs all the time with women. But if he truly valued her, this would have been fixed as soon he recognized her as a “trusted assistant” and gave her access to all the big company secrets, matching the compensation to the level of trust and responsibility involved.
As it is, he devalued her contribution to start with, and then claims to know how valuable she is and how good a friend she is, but never actually fixes it. Yes, he throws money at her when she is sick. And also he apparently refused a deal sometime in the past because an “asian investor” grabbed her and she endured it to “not spoil the deal for him”. Note: enforcing basic code of conduct is not heroism, it’s the basic level of decency. Let’s also call an implied racism here, because oh the book needed to make it specifically asian investor, not just a man, or God forbid a white guy from Silicon Valley.
I also really cringed at the whole “not for clerical help” thing. I am a software engineer so I get to be the part of the “elite”. There’s definitely prejudice and people in “not software engineer” jobs are treated worse than I am, even the highly skilled folks like UX designers, not to mention the “lowly” admins. I think it is massively unfair, I would not be able to do my job without every other team mate. But also, even being on top of the pecking order in principle, as long as the system in general is run like the tech startup in this book, women and black engineers consistently get unfair outcomes and can get treated as “clerical help” regardless of who they actually are.
Having this book treat discrimination as normal, a heroine who thinks so much less of herself than all those boy geniuses, that for me was cringe-inducing and sad. It reflects the realities in many tech companies and big corporations in general, but it does not make it right, so I can’t see the hero as a real hero.
@MD: You make some really good points, and I’m not sure why these things didn’t ping with me more when I read it (especially the “Asian investor” – yikes!). It’s been over two years since I read the book (time flies!), and so I honestly don’t remember if I even noticed the unfairness of how Becca was treated. I feel like I’m usually pretty sensitive to sexism but I think some of these contemp hockey books that I read I’m a little inured to the heroes being cavemen. Nate was different, in a way, being a nerd rather than an athlete, but somehow I just didn’t expect him to be any better. Which is a sad commentary on my expectations.
@MD: I have not read the book but that was such a great takedown. I bow down, it was that good.
@MD: I’m here for your review/great takedown as Janine said. Thank you.