Book Review: Bed and Breakup by Susie Dumond

Some years back, I wrote an entire blog post about the Enemies to Lovers trope. It is, pretty much, my least-favorite romance trope. It’s not that it can’t be done well, it’s that too often, it has too much in common with bully romance. As I said to my friends when discussing an enemies-to-lovers romantasy that I DNFed, “If somebody leaves you tied up overnight and it’s not some fun consensual scene for you two, you should not fall in love with them.”

I’m simply way too demisexual to ever be into the idea of being vulnerable with someone who deliberately hurt me.

Which brings me to Bed and Breakup by Susie Dumond. I don’t think I realized that this had elements of enemies to lovers when I put a library hold on it. I knew that it was second-chance romance, which I’m iffy on, and that it involved fixing up a house, which I enjoy (hello, competence porn). Once I realized it was enemies to lovers, I almost DNFed it, but I did need a book with this trope for a book bingo card, so here we are.

Molly and Robin are estranged wives who return to the small town where they spent their married life together for separate reasons, and find themselves both staying in the bed and breakfast they renovated together in the early days of their marriage. What’s worse — forced proximity to your ex, or realizing that all the beautiful work you’d done has been covered over with a bland remodel by the management company that ran the B&B in your absence?

Neither Molly nor Robin wants the other there, which leads to the worst part of the book. They each decide to prank the other in an attempt to annoy each other into leaving. These pranks escalate and end up drawing on actual legit phobias, and you know what? That’s really shitty. Using someone’s fear against them in a non-consensual way is not cute or funny.

This is the second sapphic romance novel that I read this summer where I just did not want to see the couple together at the end, because I did not feel like they had done enough work to resolve their issues. I could not see the ending of this book as a happy ever after, because the switch from Enemies to Lovers was switched pretty suddenly and I didn’t feel like either character ever truly addressed the wrong they had done; it was swept under the rug of “oh wow remember how much hot sex we used to have?”

It’s really frustrating, because Bed and Breakup is set in a real-life cute, quirky, queer-friendly town in Arkansas. With some people so quick to write off the red states as “they voted for this, they can suffer” I think it’s so important to be reminded that there are queer people, and welcoming communities, in conservative states (and if you think your blue state is full of loving and welcoming people, well, I’d like to talk to you about rural Washington. Have you heard about the infamous Uncle Sam billboard along I-5?). I wish I could recommend that everyone who loves sapphic romance read this book, but I just found the central relationship so uncomfortable.

TWs and CWs: Ok I am so far behind in my reviews that I can’t even remember. I need to start taking notes. There’s sexual content, mean pranks, mediocre parents, that I can recall.

Source and Format: I borrowed the ebook from Pierce County Library System.

Reading Challenge Prompts

World of Whimm: Enemy to Lover. The only reason I finished this is because I already DNFed another queer enemy to lover romance this year and there’s only so many of these I can try to read. I really hope the romance world gets obsessed with a different trope soon.

Reading Challenge Progress

Nook & Cranny (Card 1): 10 of 25, no bingos.

Nook & Cranny (Card 2): 19 of 25, 2 bingos.

Book Riot: 12 of 25.

Physical TBR: 7 of 12.

World of Whimm: 19 of 24, 4 bingos.

SAL/SPL/KCLS: 16 of 23, 2 bingos.