The Bromance Book Club by Lyssa Kay Adams
Bromance Book Club series #1
(2019) 352 pages

Final Rating: 7/10

Blurb:
The first rule of book club: You don’t talk about book club.

Nashville Legends second baseman Gavin Scott’s marriage is in major league trouble. He’s recently discovered a humiliating secret: his wife Thea has always faked the Big O. When he loses his cool at the revelation, it’s the final straw on their already strained relationship. Thea asks for a divorce, and Gavin realizes he’s let his pride and fear get the better of him.

Welcome to the Bromance Book Club.

Distraught and desperate, Gavin finds help from an unlikely source: a secret romance book club made up of Nashville’s top alpha men. With the help of their current read, a steamy Regency titled Courting the Countess, the guys coach Gavin on saving his marriage. But it’ll take a lot more than flowery words and grand gestures for this hapless Romeo to find his inner hero and win back the trust of his wife.

Review:
This book contains some sex scenes, sexual jokes, and sexual comments. If you’re not comfortable with any of those, I don’t suggest you read this book.

This book was either stupidly funny, or funnily stupid, most of the time it luckily was the former, but I will still never forget that cringe-inducing shower battle the two main characters had. It was the most funnily stupid thing I’ve ever read.

This book, despite its moments, was fast-paced, entertaining, and taught me more about love and relationships. A relationship between two people can have love, but it can be an unhealthy relationship. A relationship between two people can have no feelings attached at all, but it can be a healthy relationship. Of course, love and good relationships correlate with each other, but they are affected by each other less than some people may think.

Gavin loves Thea, and Thea loves Gavin. And yet they’re still getting a divorce. Why? Because Gavin couldn’t meet Thea halfway. He couldn’t be there enough for his wife and twin daughters. The less he spent time with them for his job, the more the family had to pretend everything was fine until the last straw broke. Thea struggled to open up to Gavin because of her past experiences with her mother and father. She couldn’t talk to him enough about their problems and just faked her way through their marriage, her happiness a facade for her daughters.

Both of them did a lot of wrong in their relationship because relationships are hard work and are full of vulnerability that some people might not be immediately comfortable with. But when you love each other, you want to spend your time and effort to build and strengthen your relationship with that person, because just love alone is not enough. But having that love is the first step.
So that’s what Gavin decides to do before filing his divorce papers: work his ass off to save his marriage. And to do that, the perfect way is to study romance novels, written by women for women; a textbook guide on how to be a good man and a good partner. Of course, Gavin thinks this is ridiculous, I mean, why listen to Lord Benedict from “Courting the Countess”? But by this point, with divorce just around the corner, Gavin is willing to try just about anything. 

Gavin is a mess at first, making mistakes at every corner, his love apparent but his actions rash. But slowly, he begins to see a change in himself as he realizes that he hasn’t been supporting Thea like how she does for him, clumsily fixing as many holes in his relationship by paying more attention to her. He starts appreciating what Thea likes and dislikes. He notices Thea’s struggles with certain people who judge her for supposedly “snatching” Gavin up with her pregnancy at a young age. He understands how lucky he is for Thea to give him another chance in their marriage. 

And by the time Gavin has done all that he could to save their marriage, Thea realizes that it’s also her turn to make that last step to the finish line.

Thea confronts her trauma and realizes that true love is enough to make a relationship work because if you truly love that person, you’d do anything to fix the reasons why your relationship not working with them. She notices how she can move on, and how love can bring so much happiness to a person’s life, even to people who have made countless mistakes in their lives but learned how to move on and grow from it.

I loved the message this book gave me because I know how it feels to know that sometimes, my love isn’t enough, and I can’t always save all my relationships. But I still made that first step; I still fought for love, even though I didn’t always win in the end.

This book was cheesy and sometimes the side characters were a little messy, but it was great nevertheless. What a ride.