The Roughest Draft Review | April 2022 WWS Book Club Pick
Plot & Why We Picked This Book
Check out our last blog post to see what this book is about and why we picked it HERE! A quick overview is that it’s about two writers (Katrina Freeling and Nathan Van Huysen) who agreed to co-write books together. After a falling out a few years ago, Katrina decides that not only is she never going to work with Nathan again, but she is also not going to write books again. When her slimey book agent fiance pressures her into writing another best seller with Nathan so he can pay his debts, she is forced to move back to the beach house with Nathan where they wrote their last novels. Can they forget about what happened in the past and make their creative partnership work?
Discussion & Review (spoilers ahead):
Ugh this book. I really wanted to love this book, and had such high hopes for it, but I’m left with mixed feelings. This discussion is basically for those who have read the book, because you’ll know what I’m referring to. If you have NOT read the book, I would probably skip this one. In short, it lacks passion, it has a weak storyline, and it drags on and on for no reason. If you love the idea of an enemies to lovers trope, this isn’t a great example of one.
What I liked:
It’s written by a husband and wife team, which I loved
I found myself wondering how many of the situations in the book were happening to them in real like as they wrote this novel. Little arguments, how they spent their days, things they said, etc
It slips between present time and the past, which I think was necessary to make the story work. It allows us to see what happened when Katrina and Nathan worked together before.
The writing is lovely and very poetic at times, but often bit too wordy.
What I disliked:
It lacked passion. It’s set up as an enemies to lovers trope, but they barely ever reach the “lovers” aspect of their relationship. There is maybe one sex scene that is extremely awkwardly written and lacking of substance. It was definitely not one of those scenes that make you blush when you read it- and isn’t that what we want?
Their characters were stereotypical and lacked growth. Katrina was beautiful, Nathan was your typical hot shot celebrity author wanna be who drove around in a sports car and didn’t actually write anything good on his own. Katrina’s ex was your typical villian who did typical villian things (shocker). They added in one stereotypical artsy/angsty friend to mix it up a bit. Everyone was the same at the end of the novel as they were at the beginning.
The entire 3/4s of the book sets you up to find out about what happened 3 years before. It makes it seem like some major secret or some massive event that caused their inital falling out. Katrina and Nathan used to work so well together, but suddenly they decide to never talk to each other again. Their fans speculate that it was some kind of affair (Nathan was married before and is now divorced in present time), and the entire book keeps you wondering what actually happened. The truth? Not much. There was no secret affair between them, or even an admission of feelings before they decided not to work together any more. Just subtle flirting through the edits on the novel they were writing, and an almost kiss. It was literally the most anticlimactic ending ever once you realized that nothing major actually caused their co-author break-up.
The book dragged on and on. I was listening to it on Audible and had to stop towards the end because I was so tired of listening to it. I did eventually go back and listen to the last few hours, but my disappointment was the same. Once Katrina gets rid of her gross fiance, and her and Nathan decide to be together, she decides they MUST finish their novel before taking their relationship to the next level. This was annoying, because we spent the entire book wondering if they would get together, and its the most boring ending ever. It would have been a perfect opportunity to have some more sexual tension between the characters- having agreed to be together but not acting on it yet- but this storyline fell flat.
Overall, I found this book really hard to get through. There was nothing that kept me excited to keep going, and I basically just finished it so I could write this review. I would not recommend.