Book Reviews

Book Blurb

Quinn Burke loves being a bartender. She meets new women every night and has her choice of bed partners. That’s fine with her because she isn’t interested in anything serious after having her heart shattered eighteen months ago.

 

Grace Everett is perfectly content owning a bookstore, but not so much in her personal life. She wants forever, but hasn’t had much luck with relationships. She’s hoping the newest woman in her life will be the one.

 

When Quinn’s mother falls ill, something shifts in the twenty-year-old friendship for both women. Quinn struggles with old feelings for Grace, and Grace is seeing Quinn in a different light. They know falling for their best friend is wrong, but could it be the right kind of wrong?

 

Book Review

The premise of this story is a simple one—what would you do if you had been best friends with someone for twenty years and you suddenly realized you were in love with her?

Quinn and Grace are those best friends. Both lesbian, they’ve supported each other through periods of playing the field as well as serious relationships that have gone wrong. At no point have their needs synchronized, so it’s never occurred to either of them to act on the feelings they’ve been vaguely aware of all this time. Now in their early forties, Quinn is single and happy to bed hop, whereas Grace is in a new relationship with a surgeon, Lauren, who she desperately hopes may be the one, but doubts start to creep in when Lauren keeps making excuses not to see her.

When Quinn’s mother suddenly has a massive heart attack, Grace drops everything to support her friend through this traumatic time. And in doing so, the closeness they’ve always shared ramps up a few notches, and the flimsy barriers they’ve erected to hide their inner feelings start to come down. With both their families just waiting for the two of them to get together, having seen for a long time what both Quinn and Grace have tried to fight, the pressure builds…

The story and its telling are just that simple, although there is additional drama in the form of a side story around Quinn’s homophobic older sisters, Meg and Beth. Quinn and her younger sister Callie are both lesbian, and have been shut out of their older sisters’ lives for some time now. Of course, their mother being so seriously ill forces all four siblings back into each other’s lives, and there’s some good tension and intelligent insights into such broken relationships.

But the main focus is on Quinn and Grace, and whether they can both face up to what they are feeling. While it’s fairly predictable how the story will go, Trebelhorn did a pretty good job of taking me on that journey. Of the two, Quinn is the most hesitant and reluctant—she’s got real fears that she’s going to lose her best friend if they try to start a romance and it all goes horribly wrong. She’d much rather keep things as they are, no matter what everyone else is telling her about how good it could be to be in a relationship with your best friend. As a result, Quinn really digs her heels in when things hot up, and I’ll be honest, I found her a bit irritating as a result in places. I had more empathy for Grace, who’s more open to exploring what they could be and believing they’d survive as friends even if a romance didn’t work out.

It’s a nice, gentle read with some great secondary characters, easy pacing, and a pleasant writing style. Something you could happily read on a lazy Sunday afternoon.

 

 

 

 

DISCLAIMER: Books reviewed on this site were usually provided at no cost by the publisher or author. This book has been provided by Bold Strokes Books for the purpose of a review.

Additional Information

Format	ebook and print
Length	Novel, 240 pages/58000 words
Heat Level
Publication Date	01-February-2017
Price	$9.99 ebook, $16.95 paperback, $16.95 bundle
Buy Link	https://www.boldstrokesbooks.com/books/the-right-kind-of-wrong-by-pj-trebelhorn-2074-b