First Time in Forever, by Sarah Morgan

Another month gone, and it is #TBRChallenge time again! Alas, I am late posting this review, for reasons explained below. The theme for April is “no place like home” (another Wizard of Oz reference, of course), and I’m going with home as “sanctuary” for my choice. (It doesn’t hurt that it lets me knock another ARC off the digital TBR shelves.)

Beware: parental neglect; alcoholism; drowning; dead child in backstory; dead parents; slut-shaming; hints of emotional abuse from a partner; DNF review with spoilers.

First Time in Forever, by Sarah Morgan

This is the first book in the Puffin Island series and, as is far too often the case, despite having at least a couple of books by Ms Morgan in the print TBR cordillera of Doom, this will be the first of her books I read.

Unfortunately, even though there are many of my fellow genre romance readers who adore her work, and this book in particular, right now I am not sure it won’t be my last; her world is blindingly white, heterosexuality feels mandatory, slut-shaming is plentiful, and the myth of small towns as utopian communities (as opposed to the evil anonymity of large urban centers) is a main undercurrent.

But I get ahead of myself; here’s the back cover blurb, setting up the story and characters:

Windswept, isolated and ruggedly beautiful, Puffin Island is a haven for day-trippers and daydreamers alike. But this charming community has a way of bringing people together in the most unexpected ways… 

It’s been a summer of firsts for Emily Donovan. From becoming a stand-in mom to her niece, Lizzy, to arriving on Puffin Island, her life has become virtually unrecognizable. Between desperately safeguarding Lizzy and her overwhelming fear of the ocean—which surrounds her everywhere she goes!—Emily has lost count of the number of “just breathe” pep talks she’s given herself. And that’s before charismatic local yacht club owner Ryan Cooper kisses her… 

Ryan knows all about secrets. And it’s clear that newcomer Emily—with her haunted eyes and the little girl she won’t let out of her sight—is hiding from something besides the crazy chemistry between them. So Ryan decides he’s going to make it his personal mission to help her unwind and enjoy the sparks! But can Puffin Island work its magic on Emily and get her to take the biggest leap of trust of all—putting her heart in someone else’s hands?

The basic premise of “why Puffin Island?” is three first-year college roommates, all of whom have different levels of family trauma, becoming the closest of friends. Upon graduation, they made a solemn promised that they’ll always help each other, no matter what. When a couple of heavy pianos fall on Emily’s head, Brittany offers her the sanctuary of her late grandmother’s cottage in Puffin Island, and Skylar offers to visit often to help Emily cope, both emotionally and logistically, with the sudden responsibility of raising a child.

Lizzie’s trauma comes from having been subjected to her own mother’s brand of narcissism (benign neglect at best, being paraded in public when deemed advantageous at worst), and relentless papparazzi as a consequence of Lana’s celebrity. Hiding in a small island far away from Hollywood and anything film/celebrity related? Sensible! Going to a place where you can barely think because you are scared out of your mind? Not so much.

Emily’s backstory is pretty grim. For starters, just in the past few months, her live-in partner breaks up with her because she’s “cold and unfeeling”, and reorganization at work costs her her position. Her mother was a promiscuous alcoholic and likely a narcissist, resulting in her father being literally unknown; her younger sister, the recently deceased Lana, lorded her own beauty over Emily, as an explanation for why “no one loves (Emily)”.

As if that weren’t enough, we learn very early on that she has a phobia about water, and that just being in the island–aka, entirely surrounded by water–is so stressful as to be debilitating. This, coupled with the unexpected and unwanted responsibility for a clearly-traumatized six year old is leaving Emily almost unable to function.

This at least is the explanation given for her acting like the proverbial almost too-stupid-to-live helpless and hapless blonde in a cheap horrorflick for several days; which in turn makes it a lot harder to accept the repeated reassurances, from other characters and Emily’s own internal dialogue, that she was good at her job as a management consultant (here, someone who helps businesses reorganize and strategize to increase market share, reduce wasted investment and resources, and increase profit).

While the details of the phobia-originating incident are not spelled out until close to the midpoint in the book, they are heavily hinted at from the start: when she was a child, about the same age as her niece is now, her baby sister drowned while Emily–just four years older–was in charge. At the time, her mother was pregnant with her third and last daughter, Lana, who in turn left guardianship of her own daughter to Emily.

There is added trauma for Emily here because the sister she lost was her entire world, and her mother’s reaction to the drowning was to blame the six year old for the death of the two year old–not the fact that she herself was off somewhere else. Since then, Emily hasn’t allowed herself to love; by the time she met Brittany and Skylar, she has convinced herself she’s unable to feel deeply about anyone or anything, let alone love. And sex is, at best, “nice”.

Enter Ryan, who has his own trauma around love and family (because of course he does), and more recent trauma from his previous profession. He owns the island’s biggest marina, and one of the largest businesses on the waterfront (and likely the island as a whole), and has been asked by Brittany to help Emily.

Ryan’s parents died in a car crash when he was thirteen, and while his grandmother moved in and took charge in the legal sense, in many ways Ryan was the emotional and logistics parent, because she was physically frail. So Ryan was the one getting the younger kids up and ready for school, the one to whom the youngest sister (all of four) attached herself to, and so forth, for years.

By the time Ryan left for college, “not having or being responsible for children” was his guiding principle; second only to, “see the world, go places where no one knows everything about my life”. From there to war correspondant there’s but a small jump; and from there to a traumatic event in a war zone an even smaller one.

“Trust me, there is no better lesson in contraception to a thirteen-year-old boy than looking after his four-year-old sister.” “Why are you back home?” Because he’d stared death in the face and crawled back home to heal. (Ryan and Alec, Chapter 2)

Of course, when Emily realizes that Ryan is a journalist, there’s a bit of a to-do over his “lying” about it, but she soon gets over herself; for starters, a war correspondant is far from a celebrity gossip, and Ryan left journalism behind after losing a close friend, for whose death he blames himself.

As all this is being revealed, a number of secondary characters are introduced; most prominently, of course, the two other couples for the next two books, including quite a bit of backstory for those four secondary characters. But not just them, as this is essentially a small town contemporary, and therefore we get the “club of feisty octogenarians”, the “worried younger sister”, the single mother of twins trying to get a business off the ground on “a dream and a prayer”, and the “slightly kooky waitress” as well.

The narrative voice is pretty competent, and I was fairly well engaged in the story at first. Then, the repetitions started grating on my nerves. Inside the first chapter, we get the same bit of backstory and character exposition three or four times for each of the two main characters, in one case with a secondary character using the exact same phrasing as the main character had just used in their internal dialogue.

I kept going–with quite a bit of internal grumbling, because the repetitions did not stop–; quitting on the first chapter when there’s nothing horribly offensive there always feels unfair to me, and I very much wanted to see Emily come into her own as a de facto mother to Lizzie.

She might not know anything about being a mother, and she might not be able to love, but she could stand between this child and the rest of the world. (Emily, Chapter 1)

So I put up with a lot of instant, ramped-up physical attraction that felt very much out of proportion to the rest of the story; the aim of which, of course, is to highlight how these two people are perfect for each other, and that their bodies essentially recognize this from the get-go. I was not quite convinced myself that someone who fainted after a panic attack would wake up, look at the guy who caught her, and immediately feel horny, but this is a common genre romance trope, a shortcut to show an emotional connection between the leads, and so I keep reading, until i reached the scene were she overcomes her decades-long phobia in two paragraphs (at 67% in my kindle).

The full scene is longer, but we are expected to believe that she overcame a debilitating phobia over the course of an hour, and essentially simply because she decided she needed to overcome it, for Lizzie’s sake, and Ryan was there to teach her to swim, so now it’s all good, no more fear of water. So much “no more fear”, that they engage in heavy petting and she has an orgasm–in the water, literally hanging from Ryan. (The power of the magic wang is another well known genre romance trope.)

I forced myself to keep at it, which involved a lot of avoiding reading–hence this review being a day late–, and by the time I reached the first full-on sex scene (86% in my kindle), I realized I was skimming far more than I was reading, and gave up.

The book is 384 pages long (I had to give percentages above because it’s an old digital ARC, without page numbers); if the endless repetitions of “I can’t love”, “I don’t want children” and so on, were excised, and fewer details about the future-books’ protagonists had been tacked on, it would be considerably shorter and an easier read overall. (Or the author could have leaned into it, and make it a longer ensemble novel, à la Nora Roberts’ Three Fates.)

I didn’t care for the slut-shaming; up to the point I gave up, there is no mention of Emily’s mother having any family whatsoever, only that she was “not quite a prostitute, but could get things and money from men because of her body” and an alcoholic. And while there’s a bit of a gesture towards explaining Lana’s own promiscuity as a result of their mother’s behavior, her addiction and narcissism, it’s pretty half-hearted.

I also didn’t care for the emphasis on small town living as the only healthy or good way to form community, which is present in both overt and subtle ways, like this passage early on:

“She had a city look about her. Pale and pinched.” (Ryan about Emily, chapter 2)

All things considered, I would have liked this book a lot more had I read it nine years ago when I got the ARC; I’ve grown a lot as a person and reader in the intervening nine years.

First Time in Forever is a DNF