Review: Exclusively Yours, by Shannon Stacey

Exclusively Yours was published by Harlequin’s digital imprint, Carina Press, in June of this year. I listened to it on audio, and I was underwhelmed with the narrator’s performance. She tended to pause too frequently, and emphasize the wrong words. Honestly, I felt she was “phoning it in”.

Exclusively Yours has gotten a lot of buzz in the online romance community, being featured in a Smart Bitches Sizzling Online Book Club, and being reviewed lots of places. Click on Sarah of MonkeyBearReviews for Sarah’s review as well as a list of other reviews.

Reading EY was a lesson to me in how important it is to try the same author in different subgenres. I had read one other book by Stacey, a Devlin Group romantic suspense, which was fine, but didn’t inspire me to read more. In fairness, rom suspense is my least favorite romance subgenre. However, Stacey’s voice in EY is so much funnier and crackling that she almost sounds like a different author.

Exclusively Yours is exactly the kind of romance I love to read: contemporary, sexy, smart, funny and touching. It’s the story of Keri, a big shot celebrity weekly reporter, out to get an exclusive from Joe, a reclusive multimillion selling thriller author. The interview isn’t Keri’s idea: it’s her editor’s, an alpha shark among predators, who has discovered, with a little unsavory blog hopping, that Keri and Joe dated back in high school in New Hampshire.

Keri and Joe didn’t just date, they were deeply in love. But Keri needed to spread her wings and head to L.A. after graduation, while Joe was rooted in New Hampshire with his close knit family. They split up on bad terms, sending Joe into a drunken depression. But he’s never forgotten Keri, and, for reasons he doesn’t want to investigate too closely, he proposes that she join him and the entire Kowalski family on a two week camping trip in the wilds of New Hampshire.

Unsurprisingly, there are funny scenes of Hollywood sophisticate Keri getting mud soaked during an ATV ride and being terrified of making her way to the bathroom outside in the dark. But most of the humor isn’t situational, it’s dialogue and character based, which I much prefer. I laughed out loud too many times to count listening to this book. When it comes to Keri and Joe, this is a light romance, with fairly low conflict … so low, in fact, that it becomes a bit of a mind bender to reconcile the depth and intensity of their passion with their decade long separation. Luckily, the high sexual tension makes up for it.

Surprisingly for such a short book, Stacey manages to include a secondary romance, between Joe’s sister Terry and her estranged husband Evan, and even a third, between Joe’s brother Mike and his wife, who wants to add yet another child to their large brood. There is also Joe’s brother Kevin, whose mysterious past sets him up nicely for his own book, Undeniably Yours, released just this week.

I marveled at the way the complex family dynamics were handled in this book. They felt incredibly real to me, and, perhaps because I am middle aged and in my 15th year of marriage, with kids getting older, while I delighted in the sexy and funny relationship between Joe and Keri, I was emotionally drawn to the impasse faced by the two secondary couples, whose intense focus on child raising had changed their marriages in so many ways, not all of them positive. In short, although there is plenty of heat and fun, this is a romance which is not afraid to show us what happens after the HEA, and that there may be more than one HEA for committed relationships between flawed human beings who live recognizably human lives. In this aspect, I would compare Stacey to Jennifer Crusie, who uses humor to inject that element of realism that so many contemporary romance lack.

Many reviewers have noted that the author’s decision to tell the story of the entire Kowalski family took some of the focus off of the main romantic relationship, and this is true. If you are a reader who likes a “pure” contemporary with intense focus on the h/h, EY may not be your best bet. In trying to interpret the trajectory of Keri and Joe’s relationship, I was torn between thinking either (a) the conflict was too superficial, so why have they been apart so long, and (b) the conflict is deep and significant, but then why did it get solved so easily? In the end, if the conflict wasn’t rendered to suit my tastes, I did believe completely in their love, which, for me, is what matters.

My final comment is about the cover:

I love it. It’s perfect for the story, and it’s not the kind of cover anyone has to hide.