REVIEW: Against a Wall by Cate C. Wells
Dear Cate C. Wells,
This contemporary romance came up after I did not finish the first book in this series, Hitting the Wall. Commenters on the review described this one as better and I was in the midst of a three-month free trial of KU, so I decided to give it a shot.
Glenna was bullied by Cash in middle school and high school. Even in adulthood, Cash makes fun of her. The book starts with Cash showing up at the cafe where Glenna works and mocking her, then loosening the lids on all the sugar jars (there’s one at every table). Glenna, who was recently dumped by her co-worker boyfriend, Toby, feels miserable when the sugar pours out all over the table in front of the customers who were in on the joke. She responds by removing the truck nuts from Cash’s truck (yes, he’s the kind of man who has truck nuts) to get him back.
To protect her father, the owner and editor of the local newspaper as well as the writer of an article about a scandal the sheriff is involved in, Glenna put the article under her byline. The sheriff is beloved by many and now tensions are high in the area. Glenna is on the receiving end of a lot of anger and cold shoulders.
Cash owns a business giving hunting and fishing tours on a mountain where Glenna, who wants to start a photography business, takes photographs. She’s sitting still taking one when one of the hunters Cash is guiding shoots her in the arm. Cash is frantic to help her and assists her down the mountain. He’s been secretly in love with her for years.
There’s also some history with Cash’s sister, Dina, who is neuroatypical. Dina and Glenna were close friends as children but Glenna dropped Dina in middle school after she overheard something really mean Cash said to his friends while she was visiting Dina—that Glenna was the chairman of the itty-bitty titty committee (why he said it is eventually explained).
Glenna never explained the reasons she stopped going over to Dina’s to Dina or anyone else, and to this day, there’s tension between her and Cash’s family members. Tension that is exacerbated by the fact that the article she “wrote” about the sheriff has led to an FBI investigation and the sheriff, a good family friend, has been forced to go on leave.
Eventually, Cash proposes to Glenna that they fake date so that she can get back at Toby and he can repair this reputation and that of his business after the shooting. This is more of a ploy to get involved with her than anything. Glenna plans to refuse but just then she sees Toby with his new girlfriend and she plants a passionate kiss on Cash to show Toby that she doesn’t care. The kiss is hot but more to the point, she now has to go along with the fake dating, at least for a little while.
Cash and Glenna’s “first date” doesn’t go well; a female friend of Cash’s is jealous and mean to Glenna. But Cash keeps trying to win her over. As he realizes how hurtful his behavior has been, he apologizes and makes up for it with better behavior.
This book was indeed better than Hitting the Wall, but I was still underwhelmed. The plot was slight; after a fair amount of buildup about threats that Glenna’s father has been receiving because of the article on the sheriff, we get very little payoff.
Cash made genuine efforts to make up for his actions and I believed he was sincere in his apologies and gestures, but I still didn’t like him. I often find good ole’ boy characters irritating and that didn’t help. I didn’t understand why the town loved Cash so much, beyond the fact that he was good looking, smiled a lot, and came from a powerful family. I guess that’s enough reason for many people but given his jerkiness to Glenna it seemed to me that someone besides her father should have been on her side. And why didn’t Glenna have any friends as an adult? That didn’t fully make sense to me.
In any case, Cash’s popularity, his remorse, and his attempts to make up for the past weren’t enough to make me love Cash like the townspeople did. I guessed that this book probably wasn’t for me after Cash helped the injured Glenna pee behind a bush on their way down from the mountain and got turned on as he was helping her pull her pants back up. Really? Also, I was bullied in school myself so it’s hard for me to see this setup as romantic.
I wasn’t a fan of Glenna either. She was morose and her low self-esteem annoyed me after a while. Yes, she didn’t deserve to feel bad about herself and yes, she was aware that it was a pitfall of hers. But I wanted her to get beyond acknowledging the issue to overcoming it, and I felt that could have been signaled more clearly. Just as I felt that Kellum needed to go beyond being good to Shay for me to be convinced that he had redeemed himself, I needed Glenna to go beyond deciding that she wanted to be with Cash to believe that she got her self-esteem back. I would have liked to see her make a friend and take her photography business further. That would have made her growth more convincing and satisfying.
Glenna’s response to something that happened as part of the dark moment was also really dissatisfying and read like a setback.
Glenna’s childhood backstory with Dina felt flimsy. If Glenna didn’t want to go to Dina’s house anymore, why didn’t she just invite Dina to hers? Dinah and Glenna could also have hung out somewhere else–the school grounds during lunch break, a quiet park, or at Glenna’s house. And even if Dina wasn’t up for that because of her disability, suggesting it would have at least allowed Dinah to know that Glenna still cared about her and liked her.
Toby was portrayed as a stereotypical small-town hipster wannabe and I felt he was a flat character and too obvious a punching bag. I would have liked to see a little more complexity there. He had used Glenna and gaslighted her so I also wanted to see him suffer a little.
As a vegan I was annoyed by the way veganism was attached to Toby. Vegans are so often stereotyped in books. Why??? Many of us are normal people and different from everyone else only inasmuch as that we don’t want to support the killing of animals. What’s so bad about this that we have to be stereotyped as weirdos with ridiculous reasons for our eating choices?
I was also annoyed that Cash and Kellum’s parents had apparently not gotten the memo about the sheriff from Shay and Kellum, and that Shay, who had been railroaded out of town by the sheriff as a teen, had to put up with hearing him praised at a dinner in their house. It’s a good thing I was partly prepared for that (Rose had warned me) but it still bugged me.
There were some nice things in this book. I appreciate that Cash’s reformation was genuine. He was too mean in the very beginning of the book for his backstory to make complete sense, but I went with it because I liked his efforts to do better.
I also liked that Glenna’s hair was blue—it gave her some individuality. I liked that her father was a left-leaning deadhead despite the fact that the town was almost certainly predominantly republican, although I felt like it would have been nice to have more insight into him. He went against the grain pretty hard in a place like Stonecut Country and got a lot of pushback, and though I’m sure his motives were genuinely good, it would have been more satisfying to get a deeper look at him and at them. I really liked Cash’s friends, the Carrols. There was a lovely moment involving Cash’s mom and the sheriff’s wife near the end of the book. Dina had a cool treehouse.
Other than that, eh. I’ve now tried three Cate C. Wells books. This one was the best of the three but still meh, so I have to conclude that this author’s voice doesn’t work for me. C-/C.
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I’m sorry Wells’s voice doesn’t work for you, Janine, but no single author can do it for everyone. However, she’s a writer who really hits my sweet spot. I love her world-building (especially in her shifter romances), her delineation of social classes, the perception and awareness of her heroines, and (especially) her insight into heroes who begin to understand their levels of entitlement and how they have failed the women they love. Wells’s heroes want to do better, but don’t always have the emotional bandwidth to do so without blunders. As the old saying goes, no two people ever read the same book—and this is obviously the case when it comes to Wells.
I may give this one a try despite the issues you mention, Janine, as I did enjoy two other books by the author. That business with the sugar dispensers doesn’t sound too promising though.
@DiscoDollyDeb: I think her worldbuilding is actually one of my problems. Her worlds are really mean and sexist. I’ve enjoyed many a dark book in the hands of other authors, and even worlds that are quite dark (see: Black Ice by Anne Stuart, which if you haven’t read I think you might like—it’s my favorite romantic suspense and one of my favorite contemporaries). But I’ve been on the receiving end of a lot of meanness in my life and I don’t want to spend my reading relaxation time in worlds that are that mean.
@Kareni: If you liked her other books you might like this one. I couldn’t finish the other two I tried, this was the only one I did. What were the others you liked?
Not my favourite Wells but like DDD, I think Wells works better for me in general.
I was with you in feeling angry that the family didn’t cut their friendship with the sheriff. But, while it wasn’t satisfying in the sense that all loose ends were tied up, I thought it was realistic that people would cling to what was familiar, what they wanted to be true, because it would be difficult to break years-old relationships, and admit that respect and affection had been so misplaced. Depressing, yes, but this made the antagonists more effective and more frightening.
I think she explores this a little more in Heavy, which is about Dina. Dina is much more clear-sighted and can see that her parents – and her brothers Cash and Kellum – don’t really see how awful the antagonists of the first two ‘Wall’ books are, because they don’t want to poke about behind the facade of the law-abiding policeman, or the respectable businessman (I do think this is something Wells is very good at, looking at how power structures are built and reinforced). Also, I started by wanting to hate Cash, but he listens and thinks and tries to work past his own assumptions and blind spots and darn it, I couldn’t help liking him, truck nuts and all.
@Empress of Blandings: It was realistic, yes, but this is where I come back to my previous position that Kellum should have gone a lot further and quit his job with the sheriff and refused to speak to his family—at least until his father made genuine amends. Staying supportive of the sheriff isn’t that.
(I also feel that Kellum should have turned himself in to go before a judge for the corruption of a minor charge—then he could be given a more lenient sentence in light of the fact that he didn’t know and that Shay was in favor of that).
Interesting about Dina in Heavy. I agree with her view of that but not enough to try the book. :)
@Empress of Blandings: I was going to add—by the end I didn’t dislike Cash at all, but I didn’t really like him a lot either. For all that I didn’t finish Hitting the Wall, I feel that Shay in that book was a much better character than either Cash or Glenna.
Ugh. I am willing, sort of, to come to terms with grade school bullying; high school not as much; and absolutely not an adult who still mocks a person and then sabotages sugar shakers (and no one thought to stop him?). That is so far into WTAF territory that I wouldn’t consider even trying to read it. I absolutely respect this is YMMV territory and am glad others enjoy this author’s books.
@Empress of Blandings: I was surprised by how much I liked Cash. Even with his past dickishness, which is considerable, he’s a better man than Kellum – and more willing to acknowledge his wrongdoing. He was adorable with Mia and I liked his relationship with the Carrolls.
I didn’t have a problem with Glenna dropping Dina when they were younger; she was 13 and overwhelmed, and it’s clear that nobody seemed to notice or care enough to help her deal with things at the time. In Heavy, it’s mentioned that Dina* attended a different school, so she and Glenna wouldn’t have had daily opportunities to interact. And Glenna’s limited social life seemed to have a lot to do with her unhealthy relationship with her ex.
Glenna wasn’t my favorite character to read, but her behavior made sense to me as written. Plus she got to castrate a truck, which surely nobody can object to.
* Ooh boy does Dina see her uncle very, very clearly for what he is.
@Darlynne: Not only did no one think to stop him, they knew what he was doing and enjoyed the “joke.” The town didn’t like Glenna very much. Because of the article about the sheriff, but I think they might have enjoyed being in on it even without it; Cash was much loved and indulged by everyone.
@Rose: I agree Cash was a big improvement on Kellum, but that’s a low bar for me.
Glenna and Dina attending different schools makes Glenna’s actions more understandable and I wish it had been mentioned in this book. I also agree that Glenna’s unhealthy social life had to do with Toby and that didn’t bother me at all. What I meant was that I wanted her to develop a better one over the course of this book, after splitting with Toby. Making a new friend in the midst of the events of this book would have added a lot more appeal to her character.
I agree that Glenna’s behavior made sense.
@Janine I’m with you that Kellum never really went the distance in terms of his integrity. He was angry about what had happened to Shea, but was still way too ready to uphold the status quo in town, and the forces that had originally driven her out.
Agreeing also with @Rose I think Cash ends up as a better person overall than Kellum. He seemed readier to look back and reassess how he, and the people around him, had acted. And then there was Dina. Ooooh Dina.
To all: if you like Dina, her story is related in HEAVY where she falls in with a motorcycle club president (her older brother, John, whose story is told in WALL, is a member of the same club). I have a daughter who is, like Dina, on the high-functioning end of the autism spectrum and I thought Wells did a good job of showing the thought processes of someone on the ASD, particularly when trying to parse the nuances of truth, socially-acceptable “white lies,” and outright falsehoods.
Thanks for this thorough review janine ! Also I have to say I appreciate DiscoDollyDeb’s enthusiastic defence ( and your recommendations in general I’ve gotten so many good books from your comments!!)
I only read the werewolf book— and I hate to say I cringed at the cover and the title. I liked the heroine a lot more than the hero in that book and found the resolution too quick and too easy. I found the hero a little bit stupid — I like it when the heroine and hero are more well matched. I liked the heroines feistiness and her farmers market endeavours her independence within dependence and her resilience. I wanted her to have a better hero!! I also would have loved more information about mechanics of the world — the wolf side as well as human.
After reading the description of this book and Janine’s review I think I’ll pass on this author. I think her heroes are not heroic at all. More like brutes !
@Layla: Cash really isn’t a brute at all by the end of the book. Like others said he does a good job of making it up to Glenna. He’ll never be a favorite of mine though.