Exclusively Yours by Shannon Stacey

At first glance, Exclusively Yours really seemed like my type of thing. A second chance romance, featuring a hilarious-yet-loving family, a camping trip, and potential sexytimes. Alas, my expectations were thwarted, and Shannon Stacey did not deliver anything that met my exacting standards—this book was good, but not great.

So, yes, we all know that second chance romance My Thing. I love it. A lot. And yet…I didn’t actually like it all that much with this book’s main characters, Joe and Keri. They were high school sweethearts and the whole town thought they’d spend forever together. But Keri broke up with Joe after graduation to pursue a career in Los Angeles, which sent Joe into an alcohol-soaked depressive spiral that ignited his own writing career. Now, 20 years later, Keri is back in town on a mission to save her hard-won job, which means she has to get an interview with Joe, famously reclusive bestseller. Of course, it takes all of 2 seconds for the two of them to realize that they’ve still got huge metaphorical (and literal) hard-ons for each other, and the rest of the book revolves around them coming terms with the fact that they never fell out of love.

Cue my dissatisfaction.

It just doesn’t seem likely to me that you’d still be so very madly in love with someone you have neither seen or spoken to since you were 18. I understand that your first love is powerful and all that, but after 20 years with no contact and numerous intervening relationships, really? You see each other and you’re willing to jump each other’s bones and move back in together forever, practically right away?

Like, I really love my spouse and hope to be with him for a long while, but if he broke up with me tomorrow to pursue his career somewhere far away and never spoke to me again…I can all but promise you that 20 years from now I’m not going to fall straight into his arms if he happens to show up again in my life. Just saying.

But, of course, this is the Alternate Reality of Romance Novels, so all of my objections don’t matter. Moving on to the other features Exclusively Yours promised and didn’t deliver.

Going on in the background of Keri and Joe’s big reunion is…a whole lot of family drama. Two of Joe’s siblings are married and both of their marriages are on thin ice. This book is kind of like a three-for-one romance, actually, since Stacey manages to deliver unto all three couples with a Happily Ever After. That’s kind of a lot going on in one average-length romance, and by the end all the disparate romance threads got too hectic. I would definitely have preferred it if the author had cut down on the background noise.

Also, I just felt like the Kowalski family was kind of raunchy in general? According to the book, Joe walks around with a near-constant boner, and everybody notices and makes fun of him. That’s a lot of sex jokes for one set of siblings. Also, Joe’s twin sister, Terry, pulls some teenage-level bitchy prank drama on Keri because of something that happened 20 years ago. Apparently everyone in this family just lives in the past?

I dunno, was just a lot of weird drama for the sake of drama, in my opinion.

The camping angle was also a disappointment. “Camping” for the Kowalskis apparently includes huge fancy RVs and a fleet of ATVs, and Stacey described the family’s daily rides ad nauseum. I know I’m a hippie, but for me camping is sitting around the campfire, swimming in the lake, watching the stars, playing cards, and spitting sunflower seeds. Camping is not watching TV in your fancy RV hookup, riding around on a 4-wheeler, doing work on your laptop, or swimming in the campground’s in-ground pool—no no no.

I mean, the forced-proximity angle of the plot was kind of exciting, for a few chapters. Like, “oh, Joe and Keri are trapped in a tiny cabin together for two whole weeks, whatever will they do?” But then that tension died after a while of the book not doing anything with it.

And, speaking of tension, I was not excited by the sexytimes or the chemistry between the protagonists in general. Early on, I felt that Stacey was doing a good job selling the lingering attraction between Joe and Keri, two people who’d been very much in love once upon a time. But then as the book progressed and I started to feel like the story wasn’t living up to its potential, the “spark” (or whatever) between the two characters died. By the time we actually got around to sex scenes, I wasn’t that into the book. And since those scenes were really not well done, it was just a huge disappointment.

So, in short…eh. I wasn’t terribly impressed with Exclusively Yours, all around. It features some of my favorite contemporary romance tropes, but all of those elements pretty much fell flat. I practically dragged myself through the last third of the book, and when it finished I found that I didn’t really care one way or the other about…well, anything. Not a great way to finish a book, y’know?

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