- Title: Not in the Plan
- Author: Dana Hawkins
- # of Pages: 311
Free-spirited coffee shop owner meets uptight coffee addict. Is an opposites-attract match brewing… or burning?
Crushed under the weight of writer’s block and a looming deadline, Mack escapes from New York to Seattle. She meets Charlie, a beautiful, generous, nearly bankrupt coffee shop owner recovering from heartbreak. For the first time, Mack has a muse. And then Mack starts using Charlie’s private stories in her novel…
When a storm traps Mack and Charlie in the coffee shop, they share a mind-bending, knee-shaking kiss. But Charlie is an eternal optimist who sleeps with fairy-lights on, while Mack is an ironing-at-5am worrier who sleeps with… everyone. They could never turn this chemistry into something real, right?
And if Charlie finds out what Mack has been doing, turning Charlie’s most intimate secrets into a juicy page-turner, will they even have a chance to try?
A swoony, steamy queer romcom perfect for fans of Ashley Herring Blake, Casey McQuiston, and Alexis Hall.
I’ve been having a strange month, reading-wise. Apart from Robert Rankin’s incredible The Fandom of the Operator, I’ve been on an unplanned binge of LGBT books, with Casey McQuiston’s One Last Stop, followed by How to Excavate a Heart by Jake Maia Arlow, for which I began writing a review and found myself “just checking out” Nancy Garden’s Annie on My Mind and reading it all over again cover to cover. I was starting to get a bit tired, and well, it’s quite possible that at 27 I’ve finally fazed out of YA lit.
Luckily, Not in the Plan’s Charlie and Mack are in their mid-twenties (with Mack losing a year somewhere in the middle, note to the editor), out and proud and with full time jobs, and at least some life experience under their belt. The emotional battles each one of them faces are more mature; recently divorced Charlie is working on overcoming childhood trauma to find love without codependency, introverted Mack is scared to love after nearly losing her mother to cancer. Each one also has her own plot line, independent of the other; Charlie is facing bankruptcy and Mack’s publishing deadline is nearing, a deadline for which she’s already been paid an advance, and then used it to cover her mother’s hospital bills, in secret. Not in the Plan alternates between their two points of view.
Charlie was definitely the more developed of the two characters. Her “origin story”, so to speak, was much better laid out, which made her motives as a character a lot more believable. Her plot-line included some heavy topics like codependency and parental abandonment, both of which were responsibly written, through Charlie’s reflections on her own life.
On that note, I do think the story would’ve benefited from aging Mack and Charlie a bit more. Some of their personal reflections seemed a bit premature coming from two twenty-five-ish year olds. Charlie’s divorce in her mid-twenties was also unusual, considering how uncommon getting married young is amongst the queer community. She could’ve just as easily have been described as getting out of a ten-year relationship instead. It would’ve stood out a lot less, and raised fewer questions that were never addressed. On the flip side, Mack’s dynamic with her originally-teen-parent-but-now-in-his-forties dad was a bit too… intimate for me. I can imagine that as a kid, he would’ve been much more like an older brother, and I’m a big fan of Gilmore Girls banter, but when it’s between a woman in her mid-twenties and her adult father, it seems off.
Not in the Plan was also my first ever ARC! Reading a book first is exciting! It also means sometimes what you get isn’t the final_for_real_this_time_v2 version, and in this case there were definitely some bumpy spots. Besides some classic violations of “show, don’t tell”, I found myself wincing at “was hypnotized by her smile and deeply feminine movements”, or physically cringing when Mack said to Charlie “Do you think this affected you as an adult? I’ve researched this stuff for my books but haven’t had this level of conversation before”, right after Charlie shared her childhood trauma. If I’d been Charlie, I would’ve gotten up and left.
And yet, with all of that said and done, I breezed through this book over a single weekend. Despite its shortcomings, Not in the Plan does romance perfectly, with just the right balance of chemistry and conflict to keep you turning the pages and rooting for everyone. A big thanks to NetGalley for giving me a chance to enjoy queer lit without also having to power through that YA teenage angst.
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