REVIEW: Wait For It by M. O’Keefe
B Reviews Category / B- ReviewsAbused Wife / Brother-in-Law / Erotic-Romance / Sister-in-Law9 Comments
Dear M. O’Keefe:
I started this series after Janine’s two very positive reviews of Everything I Left Unsaid and The Truth About Him; if I didn’t find the books quite as compelling as she did, they were interesting enough that I was eager to read the third book, Burn Down the Night, which Janine and I reviewed together. My enthusiasm going into the third book (and Janine’s as well, if I can speak for her) had a lot to do with the heroine, Joan, who had been a tough and enigmatic character in the first two books of the series. This time, Janine was slightly less enamored and particularly had issues with the way Joan’s character seemed to change in her own book. However, we both agreed that we were interested in the fourth book, which apparently would feature Tiffany and Blake. Tiffany was another tough character from the first two books that I wanted to know more about; Blake was an utter asshole but I was hoping he’d at least have to grovel at some point. (As Janine said in the Burn Down the Night review, “I hope to see Tiffany bring him to his knees”).
Wait for It opens with a scene that I believe first occurred in The Truth About Him, except now it’s from Blake’s perspective (instead of, I think, Annie’s – she’s the heroine of the first two books). He has come to the trailer park where Tiffany lives with her three young kids. He’s found out that Tiffany is (or claims to be) married to his ne’er-do-well brother Phil, and that the children are (supposedly) products of that marriage. Blake is skeptical, and has decided that the easiest way to control the situation and protect his mother is to pay Tiffany off. He offers her $10,000 to go away and stay away. Tiffany bargains him up to $20,000, and the deal is struck.
A year later, Tiffany interrupts a Christmas party at Annie and Dylan’s house, seeking help. Phil has found her – not for the first time since she’s left him – and trashed her apartment. She has her kids in the car and she’s scared and worn out. She’s decided to accept Annie’s previous offer of assistance; she wants to get a lawyer to permanently separate her from Phil and find a way to keep him away from her and the kids.
Unfortunately, Blake is at the party, and he and Tiffany clash immediately, before she even gets in the front door. When Blake realizes that Tiffany’s afraid of him, though, and that she is trying to protect her kids, his stance changes.
After anticipating with some dread how much of a jerk Blake was going to be in Wait for It, I found myself perversely disappointed by how quickly he folded. It’s perhaps similar to Janine’s issue with Joan in Burn Down the Night, though I think Joan maintained her toughness better in that book. Blake still has issues, but the bulk of distrust between Tiffany and him throughout the book is all on Tiffany’s side. I hadn’t expected that and wasn’t entirely happy about it.
Tiffany met and married Phil young, and didn’t really know what she was doing. She learned, and the last seven years have hardened her and made her fairly cynical, especially about men, especially about men with the last name Edwards. (Yes, his name is Blake Edwards. Am I the only one old enough to find that weird and startling?) She is just trying to get by and do the best she can by her kids, but Phil’s regular intrusions into their lives mean that chaos and fear are never far away.
Tiffany’s backstory was a little sketchy – she grew up at least upper-middle-class, from the sounds of it. She has disapproving parents who cut her off when she got involved with Phil, and a sister whom she’s reconnected with and who does provide her with some emotional support. I wouldn’t have minded a better understanding of just how Tiffany’s childhood was so unhappy – it seems like her father was the main villain and her mother more or less went along with her father (her mother does make some overtures in the course of the book, at least). But the specifics of her early life remain vague, and I think more detail would have illuminated how and why she ended up with a loser like Phil in the first place.
Blake also seems to have a lot of trauma in his past, but his issues are even less clear. He has a loving mother; his father appears to have been tough but present and not abusive. He has a sister with whom he has a good relationship, and then there’s Phil. Phil was apparently always a rotten apple and a lot of Blake’s life has been spent cleaning up Phil’s messes and trying to protect his family from Phil’s mistakes and misdeeds.
But if Tiffany’s angst can be sort of explained by a cold childhood and a really bad, abusive marriage, I really didn’t understand why Blake was so tortured. Because he had a crappy brother? Sure, that’s not great, but Blake is presented as so closed off that he’s been incapable of romantic relationships (he frequents prostitutes) and so angry that he regularly boxes with the goal of getting the shit beat out of him (somehow this makes him feel better, at least temporarily).
There’s just not enough in the story to justify the level of screwed-upness that Blake exhibits, so he ends of coming off to me as one of those tortured, brooding heroes that are tortured and brooding just because. I don’t like those heroes.
There’s not a lot of external story in Wait for It. There’s the hunt for Phil and the need to resolve the threat he presents. There’s the decision that Tiffany has to make about whether she wants Blake’s family (specifically, his mother Margaret) in her kids’ lives. There’s some minor conflict between Blake and Dylan, his business partner/friend and the hero of the first two books. (It mostly seems to boil down to the fact that Dylan, having had his HEA, is happy, and Blake can’t stand to be around happy people.)
But most of the story is the dance between Blake and Tiffany as they face their attraction to each other and try to decide what to do about it. (An aside: it’s at least a little skeevy that they are brother-and-sister-in-law, right? I mean, I didn’t care *that* much, but the book barely addresses it at all.) The focus on their relationship worked for me at times and didn’t at others. A lot of that just has to do with the sex and specifically the way the sex is written, which is a little…grubby for me? I don’t think of myself as someone who favors euphemistic, hearts-and-flowers sex scenes, but blowjobs on dirty boxing ring floors bring out the latent Howard-Hughesesque-germaphobe in me. Often I didn’t find the sex sexy (that’s true, to a greater or lesser degree, of the other books in the series, as well).
There are moments of insight into the characters that I liked, especially in the case of Tiffany. This resonated with me:
At school, while picking up the kids, I almost told the principal that the kids’ father was a psychopath and might very well be on the rampage after having just been served with a restraining order. I imagined the words coming out of my mouth and felt – somehow – nothing but responsibility and shame.
So I kept my mouth shut.
A moment like this makes Tiffany feel very real and relatable to me (even as I judge her slightly for putting her pride above her kids’ safety).
In the end, I wish Tiffany and particularly Blake had been more relatable overall, or that at least I could understand why they were so damn tortured all the time. As it was, the lack of motivation (again, mostly on Blake’s side, plus his abrupt about-face on Tiffany) brought the story down a notch for me. Wait for It gets a B-.
Best,
Jennie
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This is my favourite book of 2017 so far.
@Laura Jardine: Did you read the previous books in the series? If so, how did you feel about WFI in relation to those books? I think I might have liked this book better if I hadn’t read the previous books and gotten a bit burned out on some of the author’s quirks.
@Jennie: Yep, I read all of them. The ones I liked best were this one and the first one. Burn Down the Night wasn’t quite my cup of tea because I’m not such a fan of reading about bikers and crime. I don’t know why, but Wait For It just worked for me. I totally understand your issues with it, though.
@Laura Jardine: Hmm maybe I should try this one, then. I loved the Everything I Left Unsaid but Burn Down the Night was less successful for me, so it sounds like our tastes in her books might be aligned.
@Laura Jardine: I’m not big on the bikers and crime thing, either – I’ve avoided the MC subgenre entirely. I could accept the hero of Burn Down the Night somewhat because he was removed from the MC stuff in the course of the book, but mentions of it still kind of made me roll my eyes.
(Besides the glorification of criminals, I just find the whole idea of grown men in some sort of club/gang to be weird and juvenile and not aspirational or cool. But I never watched Sons of Anarchy, which I assume was the genesis for the popularity of these books.)
@Janine: Yes, if you loved Everything I Left Unsaid, I would give this one a try.
I read this book and liked it better than you did, Jennie, but not as much as you, Laura, did. It didn’t feel like a retread of Annie’s story to me. Annie’s story was all about freedom and danger, finally being free of her husband and exploring that freedom both with Dylan and on her own, but danger being around every corner at the same time. It was almost a romantic suspense.
This book was centered around Blake’s issues with money and using it for control. While I do think his change of heart about Tiffany should have been explained, it felt like an incomplete, superficial change, not a real, lasting one, and for that reason it didn’t bother me to the degree it did you, Jennie. First he’s scared of Tiffany contacting his mom so he tries to control his relationship with Tiffany using money, then he sees something he likes in her and he tries but it also scares him and he tries to exert control via money a different way. His money issues go back to his dad so I bought them, though I think it would have been helpful to know a bit more about his dad and also, about how young Blake was when he had to step in with Phil.
There was a lot I liked about the book. I liked the way it dug into Blake and Tiffany’s psychological issues. I liked the way even Tiffany’s son, Danny, had issues, unlike so many kids in romances who are nothing but cute and perfect. I liked the way Tiffany initially had difficulty getting herself off, the way she saw her body as a kind of mule because of the way Phil and even her kids had touched it. The blow job in the boxing ring worked for me. I thought the book was well-written and consistent, moreso than Burn Down the Night and I appreciated that it wasn’t quite as angsty.
My biggest issue with it was something you didn’t mention in the review (maybe because it’s spoilery?). I didn’t understand how Blake could think for one minute that he could make Tiffany and his relationship into a business arrangement while her kids were his nieces and nephew. I mean, he was trying to get her to introduce them to his mom at the same time. How he could fool himself about that was hard for me to understand. Was there some rationalization there about how all that would work, or was he just falling back on a bad habit without thinking it through? My grade would be higher if not for that but I’m still giving it a strong B.
@Janine: I think my issue had to do with expectations – the Blake that I had seen previously was not the Blake of this book. Sure, it’s true that he had reasons for presenting the tough exterior that he did in the previous books, but I was just so braced for asshole Blake that the immediate softening made it feel like he was almost a different character.
I didn’t have a huge issue with the business arrangement paired with the familial relationships. I mean, I think that was sort of Blake before he saw the light – he was going to put everything in these neat little compartments. I think it depended in his erroneous belief that he could bully others into doing things his way. Since I knew it would be resolved with an HEA, I didn’t give it a lot of thought. I did think, in general, that the whole marrying your brother’s ex and being stepdad to your nieces and nephew was sort of messy. Not insurmountable-messy, but if the characters acknowledged that at all, I missed it. That was weird to me.
And of course there’s the assumption that Phil was really going to stay gone this time, which seemed unlikely to me. I almost would’ve preferred a deus ex machina car accident (or something similar) to get Phil out of the way permanently. Part of me appreciates that O’Keefe doesn’t always tie details like that up in neat bows, but part of me likes my romance with neat bows. :-)
I get what you’re saying. I knew from reading your review to expect the softening but if I hadn’t known to expect it, it might have bothered me too.
I totally get that Blake liked to compartmentalize, but I just don’t see how that would have been possible for him in this case, once Tiffany agreed to introduce his mom to her kids. I mean, he was their uncle. Did he think he could play uncle to them at the same time he hired their mother for sex? I just don’t get how that would have worked, so I wanted to understand his thinking about it. But we only had Tiffany’s POV in those sections, which makes me wonder if his thinking about it was glossed over because there was no way to make it work in his head. But maybe I just think that because it doesn’t work in mine?
I thought there was some acknowledgement of the messiness of the situation between Tiffany and her sister. There could have been more, but it’s kind of like the way you said about neat bows– maybe it would have just made the relationship seem squicky? I’m not sure.
I was okay with the Phil resolution. It was a little convenient, I suppose, but I wouldn’t have preferred a deus ex machina death for him. I hate it when a character has to be killed off for the HEA to work anyhow. And he was Blake’s brother. If he had died, Blake’s family would have grieved, if only for the brother and son he could have been and wasn’t. So that would not have been all that happy of an ending.