Because I’m rereading The Windsor Knot, I’m going to share Sandie Herron’s review of the audiobook of Lyssa Kay Adams’ Crazy Stupid Bromance. Sandie said she didn’t mention the hilarity concerning the cat in the story. I read the first book in the series. Now, I’m going to have to pick up this one. Cat alert!
Crazy Stupid Bromance
Written by Alyssa Kay Adams
Narrated by Andrew Eiden
Series: Bromance Book Club, Book 3
Unabridged Audiobook
Penguin Audio (10/27/2020)
Listening Length: 9 hours 50 minutes
Alexis Carlisle had no intention of becoming famous when she reported her former boss, the celebrity chef, for sexual harassment at his bar and restaurant, but even a year and half later, people remember her for it. She has since opened her own café where she serves coffee and pastries with a good touch of listening. Other survivors of assault have naturally gravitated toward her place. She also brings her large cat BeefCake to the café daily, where she sometimes hosts cat adoption events.
Noah Logan, a computer security expert, is best friends with Alexis. He would like to be much more but won’t admit that out loud, until one of his clients goads him on. That client is planning his own wedding and is a member of the Bromance Book Club, a group of rather high-profile men in Nashville, Tennessee who have joined forces to help each other save their marriages and relationships. In turn, they have helped other men by reading romance novels and treating them as manuals.
Lately a shy woman named Candy has been coming to the café, and Alexis thinks she’s about to reveal her assault story when Candy blurts out that they are sisters. Alexis never knew her father, and her mother recently died, but she’d taken a DNA test on an ancestry site and made it public for possible matching. Candy put the pieces together and tracked her down. However, her motives are tied to the fact that their father needs a kidney transplant. Candy pressures Alexis into beginning the testing to see if she is a match and brings her home to the family Alexis never knew. The problem is that no one there knows about Alexis’s existence, so Candy has a lot of explaining to do.
Returning home from a trip that has left her raw and exposed, Alexis turns to Logan for support. The walls of their friendship begin to melt and their romantic feelings show. And then Logan puts on the brakes. He is cautious but Alexis feels rejected by Logan and by her father. The guys gather round to help Noah, and their women gather round Alexis, and a scheme is hatched.
What follows is steamy and romantic and touching. Alexis must sort out her feelings toward Noah and then about her father. Is he really interested in a relationship or just her kidney? Does Alexis want to take on an entire new family? Noah has his own demons to wrestle with his father’s death omnipresent in his life.
While I loved the romance in this book, I also loved how the author dealt with the very real dilemma over families of origin and what happens when they are revealed as well as the consequences of parental loss. Interspersed with the serious issues are moments of a terrific sense of humor as well. Narrator Andrew Eiden was fabulous, balancing his intensity with the narrative, bringing the listener along with him in this heartwarming contemporary story of friendship, family, and love.
Here’s the information about the book.
Crazy Stupid Bromance by Lyssa Kay Adams. Berkley, 2020. ISBN 9781984806130 (paperback), 352p.
