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Romancing the Road Trip

Okay, okay… let me get this straight: these two dudes’ entire hometown has just been flattened by a tornado?

Yep. Caleb and Ben have lived there their whole lives.

The bodies of people they have known their whole lives are piling up in the local park?

Uh huh.

Like… their Sunday School teacher?

Look, I already agreed they know everybody affected by the tragedy pretty well. Small Kansas farming town and all that.

Right. Soooo their primary concern right now is?

What’s going on with this hot chick they just had a fantastic threesome with last night.

Obviously. Um.

What?

Okay, I’ll bite. Why do they think this horrible, world-destroying event will jeopardise their hottest threesome ever?

Oh, it was really dramatic. Ireland walked into Ben’s bar and the roof fell on her head.

Oh shit! Ireland’s the hot chick right? The curvy girl of the title? Now she’s really injured too, and they feel responsible.

No, she’s totally fine. Just has a bit of plaster in her gorgeous long hair.

How’s that pos –

The bar was already pretty destroyed so there wasn’t much of the roof left.

Wait, Ben’s bar, his livelihood, was destroyed along with vast swathes of his hometown?

And then he was all like, ‘Just get out of here, Ireland.’ Ben yelled! But was also like just super super cold and controlled.

He was probably upset because – 

Like the magical night they spent together meant nothing to him! And Caleb was all like ‘I’m never going to forgive you for driving her away.’

She drove away? I mean maybe all for the best because Caleb and Ben have a whole rescue effort to – 

No, she left her camera at their house, so Ben’s got a chance to grovel.

When he eventually comes home after a day of digging bodies from the debris.

He’s there by the time she turns the Prius around. Ireland’s realized that she deserves better and is sick of being treated like shit.

Ah, so there was an incident before the, uh, massively traumatised bar owner told her to go away?

No, their night together was perfect. They worshipped her. And now they are pushing her away!

But the Sunday School teacher…

And she has this horrible sister who fills her fridge with diet shakes and this awful ex-boyfriend who body negged her constantly.

Oh I see. Ireland realizes how bullshit those toxic relationships are after the worshipful threesome. She’s going to go back and raise hell back in the big city, huh? Love that trajectory for her.

No, she’s going to go back and confront Ben.

Right.

Yeah, he’s going to have to grovel pretty hard. Only it’s really difficult for him to open up and be vulnerable.

Because he’s in shock. Because of the town-flattening tornado.

I guess. Also he has major PTSD from multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Okay, I just… I just don’t even know anymore.

Man, I’d heard Sierra Simone had invented the bonkers chart but, honestly, I thought that might just apply to consent when dealing with some kinky shit. Age play. Blood play. Priest play. Something within my range of understanding. Then I read the much-recced Misadventures of a Curvy Girl. And it turns out that what’s really wild is this. This shameless prioritization of a budding thruple over the type of tragedy that marks a community for a lifetime. Not the scale I was expecting! But maybe this is the point. This is a first-person present, deeply interior account of a romantic relationship that rivals even natural disasters for intensity and impact.

And it’s definitely a risky romance. For Ireland, the risk is challenging a lifetime of not feeling worthy of having her dreams come true because of her body type. For Caleb and Ben, the risk is the future of their complicated, life-long partnership. It’s big! That said, this book is… a lot. The intensity of these introspective characters can feel like way too much, especially when Ireland tumbles into a black hole of self-loathing. Kelsey quit at this Dark Moment when Ireland’s newfound happiness – and horniness – collapses in the face of a perfectly horrible trifecta of online shaming, ex revenge, and self doubt. I skimmed and stuck around for my favourite character of the whole book to emerge at 85%.

We both really want to give Sierra Simone a second chance. I’ve subsequently looked up the real Sierra Scale where she rates tropes along a Wild/Wrong axis. Her basic idea is that surging up the Wild side is a no-holds barred bonkfest of joy, that crawling out further and further along the leg of Wrong gets us to a very icky place, and that playing around in the high-concept ground where Very Wild meets Quite Wrong equals some of the most intriguing Romances around. Simone wrote a lovely post when she shared the scale. Go there! she urges. Get all taboo. But also DO THE WORK. Complicate your premise and characters. Acknowledge the power at play here. Question why you want to write this story at all.

I can’t help feeling that the ‘Misadventures’ franchise, a twenty-plus series to which she contributed a few books, didn’t allow Simone to do all the work she wanted. One of the most glaring but unacknowledged power differences between Ireland and her ardent lover boys is a full decade of life experience – a life which in their case has included many years of menage relationships. Our heroine is really digging herself out of a significant knowledge deficit. The character she meets at 85% is a charismatic shortcut to self-knowledge but it would have been really awesome to watch Ireland go back to Kansas City. She would kick her negging sister and ex into touch and realign her professional goals around her hard-won body confidence. Maybe her instinct to photograph tragedy could have been the conflict between these characters rather than a PTSD sufferer’s outburst during a majorly triggering moment. Who knows?

In the Sierra Simone era, there’s a lot of grey areas to play with in Romance, and few absolute truths. But one unassailable fact is that having a threesome in a barn while a summer storm rages outside is insanely hot.

Next time: Hot Book Club Summer continues with Xeni by Rebekah Weatherspoon with its modern marriage of convenience plot and thicc Scotsman!