Ready or Not

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Ready or Not

By: Cara Bastone

Narrated by: Alex Finke

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A slow-burn friends-to-lovers romance from Cara Bastone, an audio bestselling author, perfect for fans of Jo Watson, Lauren Layne and Hannah Orenstein.

A surprise pregnancy leads to even more life-changing revelations in this heartfelt, slow-burn friends-to-lovers romance of found family and unexpected love.

Eve Hatch has always been content to coast through her life, with a steady, if uninspiring, job and a cozy apartment in Brooklyn, close to her childhood best friend Willa and far from the traditional midwestern family who never really understood her.

But when she finds herself pregnant after an uncharacteristic one-night stand, her comfy life is suddenly up in the air. Eve's loyal friendship with Willa is feeling tense, right when she needs her the most, and it's actually Willa's steadfast big brother, Shep, who steps up with the most support and he's...suddenly kinda hot?

As if she needs one more complication, there's also the baby's father, who is technically supportive, but majorly conflicted. But as Eve struggles to figure out the next step in her expanding reality, she begins to realize that family and love, in all forms, can sneak up on you when you least expect it.

Cara BastoneAlex FinkeHeadline Eternal

Contemporary

Contemporary Romance

Friendship

Genre Fiction

Romance

Heartfelt

Feel-Good

Pregnancy

Contemporary Contemporary Romance Friendship Genre Fiction Romance Heartfelt Feel-Good Pregnancy

Most relevant

I was so looking forward to this book, having loved "Just a heartbeat away" and this author's writing style. In many ways, it did not disappoint. I gobbled up the audio version in a day and a half. As I savoured the author's wonderful prose, which was so well crafted, I honestly believed this was going to be a 5 star read. So why isn't it?

Firstly, for a book that purported to be a romance, I felt the actual romantic element took a backseat to the pregnancy part of the narrative. This was more a work of women's fiction, telling the story of a clueless millennial who accidentally gets knocked up and how she deals with it, than a romance.

Then, there was the fact that I found all the main characters unlikeable - even Shep (the saint), the supposed hero of this romance. He was no such thing. He was so passive, so utterly emasculated and far too unselfish to be real or to be appealing as a romantic hero. I would hate to have somebody like that as a partner - highlighting my own human weaknesses at every turn with his selfless perfection.

Perhaps too, the reason why this book, in the end, did not land well with me was the very of its time wokish and slightly preachy tone to it - which reminds me a little of "Out on a limb" by Hannah Bonam-Young, yet another accidental pregnancy story. I can well imagine it being fodder for anthropologists of the future wanting to understand the peculiarities of societal norms of this decade. Picture an academic some hundred years from now, lecturing her students with, "It became a cultural norm for people in the 2020s to introduce themselves with the stating of their preferred pronouns," and then using the birthing class scene as exhibit A.

Final verdict? A well written work of fiction that provides an entertaining vignette into contemporary New York millennial society, but fails epically as a romance.