Title: Sweet Talkin' Lover Series: Girls Trip #1
Author: Tracey Livesay
Published: December 30, 2019
Genre(s): Romance: Contemporary
Page Count: 363
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:Marketing manager Caila Harris knows that the road to success in the beauty industry doesn’t allow for detours. She’s forsaken any trace of a social life, working 24/7 to ensure her next promotion. When grief over her grandfather’s death leads to several catastrophic decisions, Caila gets one final chance to prove herself: shut down an unprofitable factory in a small Southern town. But as soon as she arrives in Bradleton, she meets one outsized problem: the town’s gorgeous mayor.
Wyatt Bradley isn’t thrilled about his nickname, Mayor McHottie. He’s even less happy to learn that his town might be losing its biggest employer. If he has to, he’ll use some sneaky tactics to get Caila on his side. Yet even as he’s hoping she’ll fall for Bradleton, he’s falling too—right into a combustible affair that shakes them both with its intensity.
Two stubborn people, torn between loyalty, ambition, and attraction. But when you’re willing to give it your all, there’s no limit to how far love can take you…
Tracey Livesay’s Sweet Talkin’ Lover is a small town, (sort of) enemies to lovers romance that—unfortunately—did not really impress me. While I enjoy seeing a discussion of how the idyllic small town setting isn’t great for everyone (i.e. Black people), and while I like the heroine and think her journey over the course of the novel is well-written, I still had some issues. Namely: Livesay makes very, uh…interesting descriptive choices; and also, the white hero and his family don’t do nearly enough work confronting their privilege.
All in all, Sweet Talkin’ Lover was a bit of a wash.
One of my initial quibbles with the book is that the romance aspect of the plot takes too long to get started. This new series is called “Girls Trip,” and the overarching conceit is that four college friends go on an annual vacation together—presumably, this will be a series of four books, so that each woman meets her future spouse. The problem here was that even though Livesay chooses to introduce readers to this group of friends in the first chapter, the friend group as a whole does not play into the rest of the plot in any way. The main character, Caila, only speaks to one of the women during the story, so the whole set-up of the series felt like it was taking up extra space in a book that needed to get straight to the point.
And the point is: Caila Harris is a successful Black woman working in a Fortune 100 company, but she’s let her grief over her grandfather’s death affect her work, and now the big promotion she’s been waiting for is on rocky ground. So: she gets sent to rural Virginia in order to “prove herself” to the higher-ups. (It seems racist that Caila is essentially demoted after a single night of public drinking, but Livesay chooses not to engage with racist corporate culture in Sweet Talkin’ Lover, which is certainly a valid choice.)
Enter Wyatt Asher Bradley IV, aka “Mayor McHottie” of Bradleton, Virginia (named after his family, natch). Look, I want to avoid sounding like I’m critical of all interracial romances / white men, but here’s the thing: Wyatt is an absolutely mediocre hunk of white bread, and Caila has no business being with him. This complaint is not so much about Wyatt’s race itself, but is more about his lack of self-awareness or willingness to do uncomfortable things like…confront your racist family when they’re being awful to a Black woman you claim to love? Also…why was Caila doing all the emotional labor of calling out racism and educating Wyatt when he’s a completely intelligent human being with a JD and an MBA?
Like, at severals points Caila mentions that she’s uncomfortable living in small towns like Bradleton, and Wyatt gets all up-in-arms defensive. It never once occurs to him that she doesn’t like it because she’s Black and small towns in the South are hotbeds of not-so-secret racism! Hellooooooo? My guy. Or when his blue-blooded, old southern money grandfather starts speechifying about how “Caila isn’t appropriate wife material,” and Wyatt knows that this is about Caila’s race…why doesn’t he explicitly call that out? So now what? In this HEA the author sells me, am I just supposed to pretend that Caila isn’t going to have to endure simpering microaggressions over Thanksgiving turkey every year? What the fuck, Wyatt.
(Also: did Wyatt’s family ever own slaves?! They live in a 12,000 square foot mansion, which did not build itself, and they have a town named after them, in rural Virginia—it seems pretty likely. Why is this not addressed? If I were Caila, I would be asking.)
It goes without saying that not every book by a Black person needs to dismantle and explore racism. That’s a tough job, and it’s an unfair burden to put on authors of color. However, Livesay repeatedly brings up Caila’s experiences with racism at the hands of people like Wyatt, her supposed love interest. Under these circumstances, I would have expected Wyatt to reassure his love interest that he’ll take steps to use his privilege in ways that protect her (and their future children) from harm—especially when the harm may come from his own family. A simple conversation would have done the job for me!
Aside from the above, I feel like the romantic plot in Sweet Talkin’ Lover is…fine. Caila and Wyatt are instantly in opposition as soon as she arrives in Bradleton, but their antagonism slowly leads to spending quality time together, then having sex. Except then Caila’s role as a big corporate exec gets between them, there’s a Big Misunderstanding, followed by heroic self-sacrificing actions that clearly telegraph their love and commitment. It’s nice! Livesay follows the traditional, expected beats of a romance novel, and she gets it right. I don’t hate this book—I just have some questions about the male protagonist’s ability to empathize with his Black love interest.
However, on a more technical level: I don’t like Tracey Livesay’s writing. Her descriptions are just so…questionable. At one point during a sex scene, Caila’s breasts are described as “smooth roundness, ” “chocolate thumbprint cookies,” “orbs,” and “peaks”—all in the same paragraph! It was too much.
Even before that, Livesay really lost me when she tries to convince readers that Wyatt wearing a safety hairnet inside a factory is sexy:
It should be a cardinal sin for a man to be that attractive, especially standing in a building that manufactured products to enhance a woman’s looks. He needed no improvements. She pit her bottom lip and took in the view: dark denim shirt, olive khaki pants, sharp, stubbled jaw. Even the white nylon hairnet he wore, which should’ve looked silly on him, added to his dark appeal. He looked rugged, stylish, and sexy as hell.
(Emphasis added). Rugged! Stylish! Sexy as hell!
No, ma’am.
Anyways. Sweet Talkin’ Lover is a meh read. The basic structure of the plot works for me, and I like the female protagonist. I’m left slightly discombobulated by the way racism is referenced but never explictly addressed by the characters (which I think is probably an important conversation when you have an interracial couple, especially where the white person is likely a descendant of slave owners). Finally, I just really don’t vibe with Livesay’s prose and descriptive choices.
All in all, this book is okay for me, but didn’t quite rise to a level where I “like” it.
