REVIEW: While You Were Seething by Charlotte Stein
Dear Charlotte Stein,
While You Were Seething is the third in Charlotte Stein’s fake relationship trilogy which commenced with When Grumpy Met Sunshine and continued with My Big Fat Fake Marriage. It’s fair to say I enjoyed the first two more than the third but how much of that is my current struggle to read at all and how much is down to the book itself is hard to tell.
Daisy Emmett is an English public relations specialist, hired by Harchester Publishing (Beck from My Big Fat Fake Marriage) to assist American romance author Caleb Miller with a problem of his own making – he recently said “Happy endings are for fools” on The View and his readers are pretty upset about it. He has a book coming out soon and Harchester is in damage control.
Caleb Miller was a very famous man. And not just because his books were familiar with the number-one spot on every bestseller list in existence. Or because there was now a near cottage industry of glossy TV adaptations of most of his work, two of which had starred Nicole Kidman. Or because many airport bookstores survived on his name alone.
No, there was also his mythos.
The legends that had built up around him.
That he hated talking to people so much everyone in the small town he lived in had barred him from their establishments. That he never smiled; that he did smile but his smile was bloodcurdling; that if you smiled at him, he would have you fired. And of course the big one: that the only thing he cared about was the mysterious beloved he had lost long ago.
Oh yeah, people loved that one.
Daisy has a plan to hire an actress to play the part of Miller’s long lost love and appear with him at various stops on a book tour. It takes quite a bit for her to convince him to go on the tour at all but he insists on driving rather than flying. Not just driving – driving in his own beat-up old pickup truck. This means Daisy and Miller (she mostly calls him Miller, he mostly calls her Emmett) will need to spend a lot more time together than Daisy had originally planned. But, needs must.
Daisy and Miller have some history. Ten years earlier, they were in university together (in the US – Daisy was on a scholarship) studying writing. Miller was taciturn even then, disdaining any softer emotion and keeping himself to himself. For some reason though, Daisy in particular just rubbed Miller the wrong way and it seemed to her like he’d take any opportunity to sneer at her – about the enthusiasm she had for eating, laughing, music, movies, writing, romance – any of it. Daisy held her own in their encounters and didn’t let it show just how much Miller’s words hurt her but she has regarded him as her “mortal enemy” ever since. She figures Miller feels the same way now as he did then.
It’s not hard to see where things are heading of course. Miller had very strong feelings for Daisy back then but was unable to express them. It took a little long in the book to tease out why that was. The story is told entirely in Daisy’s POV so this was extremely difficult to show narratively prior to close to the end but it did have the effect of making Miller’s reaction to Daisy seem out of proportion and difficult to understand.
Miller, after learning that he had actually hurt Daisy’s feelings when she lets it slip early in their road trip, suggests he pretend like he’s a nice guy who appreciates all things Daisy Emmett and Daisy finds herself lulled by his sudden turnaround. But it’s not real. It can’t be real. Miller hates her and that’s that. There’s a fair amount of Daisy believing she’s hate-worthy wrapped up in there too.
When Miller and Daisy “accidentally” start having sex – kind of on a dare really, I did have some cognitive dissonance because at the time Daisy believes she hates Miller and he hates her. But it was really clear to me (and to everyone who saw them together in the book) that they were in fact [well on the way to being] deeply in love.
I liked the road trip device. It kept the focus on the protagonists, created a lot of opportunity for them to spend time together and explained the absence of a larger cast for most of the book. I enjoyed the signature Charlotte Stein humour as well but ultimately I struggled a little to connect with the story. I have a feeling a lot of that was on me (new job, family illness, general reading slump all combined) so it was a little hard to grade this one. There’s a lot to like but I still don’t think While You Were Seething is as strong a book as the first two in the series, so I’m going with a B.
Regards,
Kaetrin
Thanks for your thoughtful review, Kaetrin. This sounds intriguing.
Regarding “new job, family illness, general reading slump all combined” ~ sending good wishes for less stressful days and some good books.
@Kareni: Thank you Kareni!