Friday, October 26, 2018

Sarah's Review: Rafe

This is a Royal Pick for October, so head on over to the giveaway going on right now! Ends Sunday. Good luck! :)



Rafe by Rebekah Weatherspoon
Publisher: Rebekah Weatherspoon Presents (September 26, 2018)
Series: Loose Ends, 1
Genre: Contemporary Romance


All Dr. Sloan Copeland needed was someone to watch her kids. What she found was the man of her dreams…

After a nasty divorce and a thousand mile move, Dr. Sloan Copeland and her twin daughters are finally getting the hang of their new life in Los Angeles. When their live-in nanny bails with no warning, Sloan is left scrambling to find a competent caretaker to wrangle her smart, sensitive girls. Nothing less will do.

Enter Rafe Whitcomb. He's all of those things, not to mention good-natured and one heck of a whiz in the kitchen. He's also tall, and handsome, and bearded, and ripped, and tatted, wrist to neck.

It doesn't take long for the Copelands to invite Rafe into their home. Just as quickly, both Sloan and Rafe find themselves succumbing to a heady mutual attraction, neither of them wants to deny. With every minute they spend under the same roof, this working mom can't help but wonder if Rafe can handle all her needs...

**This stand-alone romance is fluffy. So fluffy. It’s fluff. Low. Angst. Fluff. featuring a large tatted, motorcycle riding ginger man, who bakes a mean bacon quiche and knows exactly how to wrangle clever six year olds while making their mom feel loved, loved, loved.**


While RAFE is a stand-alone novel here's a suggested reading order to get you to this point
SATED (Fit #3) (Meegan)
SO SWEET (Daniella and Duke origin story)
HAVEN (Meegan)
WRAPPED (Meegan, Shae, Sarah)
RAFE 



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Sarah's Review:



Rafe is practically perfect in every way. I loved this story from beginning to end. I have read, reviewed, and loved Weatherspoon’s novels Haven and Sanctuary, and Rafe snuggles in nicely with these two books. She masterfully intertwines worlds and characters and all of her writing has been a delight!



Dr. Sloan Copeland is a heart surgeon at the top of her game. At 28, she is a medical school prodigy who has divorced her competitive surgeon ex-husband and has relocated to LA to start over with her daughters. We meet her as she is coming home to her twins alone, without supervision...apparently the nanny quit and her almost-kindergartners have been home all afternoon by themselves. Rafe has just sent his latest nannying family to Australia for an adventure of a lifetime. They wanted him to come along, but he feels like it is time for him to get out of the nannying business. He’s barely moved back into his parent’s house when he finds out about Dr. Copeland’s situation. He’s not sure about the job, but figures that he can help her out in a pinch.



When the Copelands meet Rafe, they quickly, but not without bumps along the way, fall into an easy routine. What is not so routine is how Sloan and Rafe feel around one another. Rafe feels an instant lust, and is open with Sloan about both his feeling and ability to take care of her daughters. Sloan, who started high school at age 9 and had only had a relationship with her ex-husband, is enjoying the slow burn of Rafe’s attention.



Sloan is a bundle of contradictions, but it makes her so much fun to get to know. She is a top cardiac surgeon at UCLA and likes to show Rafe pictures of the hearts she works on over dinner. At the same time, because she went through school so fast and so young, she didn’t have the same adolescent/young adult experiences, so in some ways her inexperience shines through:



Tonight she was going to have sex with Rafe. Or at the very least, get up the courage to touch his erection.



Make no mistake, Sloan is a strong, confident woman doing her best to raise her 5 year-olds. She has a good life in a new town, with a growing set of girlfriends who we meet having girls’ night at her pool and at the school her daughters attend. But because of her genius, she has some catching up to do in the relationship department- and Rafe is just the guy to do the catching!



Sloan is a black woman succeeding in a male dominated career field. Rafe is a ginger, buff male nanny finding success in a world that can barely imagine a man as a child care provider. Besides being a super hot read (spoiler: she does more than touch his erection) this book tackles ideas of race and gender in deft and nuanced ways. Weatherspoon lays it all out as Sloan thinks about interviewing Rafe for the job:



No politics, no religion, no money mentions were a thing of the past. Rafe might be qualified, but she was trying to raise two young, biracial Black girls and she’d be damned if she let someone who was a fan of walls and assault rifles and playing fast and loose with general human rights spend that kind of time around them.



Reading that paragraph had me cheering both Sloan and Weatherspoon along. The best impulses of the romance genre allow readers to imagine love, sex, and relationships in a world where the best of humanity is allowed to flourish. Now, all good stories need strife (and Sloan’s ex-husband gives us enough of that, for sure), but Rafe shows us how to be strong without being toxic and how to be loving without being exploitative. This rings even more true this week. I read and wrote this review to the backdrop of Dr. Ford testifying to congress during Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s hearing. It has been excruciating to live in a world where women’s voices, stories, and experiences are discounted, talked over, laughed through, and misunderstood. The world of Rafe makes me want to keep on fighting and is an oasis to regroup from the feeling that the world must burn. As Rafe is a nanny, I can’t help but think of the world’s most famous nanny, Mary Poppins, saying, “in every job that must be done there is an element of fun. Find the fun and snap, the job’s a game.”  We need to talk about race and gender. We need to imagine a world that normalizes black women heart surgeons and white men who keep kids. Weatherspoon’s writing is the fun element that forces us to think about these things!



Without hesitation I give Rafe 5 stars. Rebekah Weatherspoon has become an automatic buy author for me!







5 STARS! 


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Source: eARC (author)

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Thanks for the review, Sarah! 



Enjoy!



Until Next Time,










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