the light of day and without being blinded by anger, I must say, it wasn't really 'cheating' per se, They were divorced. I just kept hoping all he did was date but it was confirmed that he had sex over the three years they were separated.
I just hate that. I want them celibate just like the heroine, I did like Lucky, the dog he hit and then saved, My dog is named Lucky so that was the best part of the book for me, I still leave it at a one star read and wish I had never read it, But it did stir up emotions,
OMG I read this book and my heart is hurting so much I want to die, I have been hysterical for three hours and I hated the male character so much, He divorced his wife for one reason, He wanted sex. And he left her and had it for three years and, oh wait, he loved his exwife and really liked telling her about his girlfriends, and letting her know he wanted sex and was getting it on a regular basis.
Of course the heroine hasn't and that is great for him and he wants to move on but doesn't want her too, I bawled my eyes out and I hated this book, Oh yeah he wanted to have sex with Anna, his new girlfriend but he still wanted to have sex with his ex wife too! I hated him and he is no ducking hero.
Such an awful story. I want heroes who love their wives forever, But he needed sex. She rejected him after the baby died, he was tempted by a coworker, he didn't sleep with her but he left his wife and ducked other women.
He had needs. I say F his needs, The heroine deserved so much better!!! And he made sure she knew he was dating/sleeping with other women and I hated him, Oh he just wAnted her to know he was moving on, What an asshole. So freaking sorry I read this, It broke my freaking heart, Such a ducking zero. And then he wanted to be a SPERM donor but still wanted to have sex with other women, Yuk! I hated him and I don't care that he went back to her! I cried for hours because I understood her pain, I made myself sick because I lived this, Why do authors write this crap!! I will never read her again, And I am so so sorry that the heroine loved him, He did not deserve it, Terrible story, terrible hero, terrible freaking nonromance!! I am so freaking sorry I actually read it, I am glad she had twins, She will need their love when he leaves her for another woman, I hated him. So sorry I read this, It sucked. and now I have to pretend that cheating is never having to say you're sorry, The Baby Arrangement
The Daycare Chronicles
Tara Taylor Quinn
Get the tissue box ready for Tara Taylor Quinns latest in her Daycare Chronicles, The Baby Arrangement, a poignant unforgettable second chance romance thats born from a tragedy.
The story follows the Braden and Mallory Harris who lost their son to SIDS three years ago and in spite of the heartache it caused and even through divorce have unbelievably managed to remain friends.
But Tara throws a very effective wrench in the story that will put readers through an emotional ringer keeping them on the edge of their seat to find out what happens while both rooting the couple on and wanting to shake them.
A tight plot, believable characters and a fantastic story will have the audience falling hook line and sinker for this pageturner,
SUMMARY:
The death of theirmontholdson Tucker to SIDS was too much for Braden and Mallory Harris marriage to handle, Mallory needed emotional support and Braden shut down all feelings, so they divorced and for more than three years theyve been the best of friends and perfect exes.
But now Mallory is ready to move on, she wants a family and has decided to be a single mom with the help of a sperm donor.
She doesnt need Bradens approval but she sure would like it, But what he proposes after she tells him knocks her socks off,
Braden only wants the best for Mallory and if that cant be him and what she wants and needs is to be single mom then hell do anything he can to help.
In fact hes decided hed like to provide the sperm,
But is he really as emotionally detached as he thinks he is and is she really prepared to have a nostrings child with a man she still loves
Miniseries:sitelink The Daycare Chronicles Stunningly beautiful
This book was written for those of us who really need to, but maybe dont always, believe in second chances.
A strong, solid, with some slight slanting toward a halfstar, maybe a,
I've often enjoyed Tara Taylor Quinn's writing over the years, and for a HQ writer who likes to combine some rather complicated issues that would end up being hardcore trope fodder, she manages to weave a genuinely intricate and achingly believable story.
She deals a lot with babies and couples and tough choices and tragic moments but it never seems to fall into a sappy, cheesy mess where you can't see a way out or feel that the drama or angst is ever forced.
This is a great example of premise Quinn likes to address that many Authors would fear, so it's why it stayed off my reading list as long as it did.
The story, I knew, had a tragedy, . . well, a double tragedy if you count that a marriage was lost in the middle of a child's passing, And not just the sheer amount of guilt each parent has but background piles upon piles of past baggage they've never really let go of.
What did stun me, and a few things from it that got repetitive, a little annoying, . . was that these Exes had been divorced foryrs prior to this The Baby Arrangement's start and they were still a huge part of the other's life.
It felt odd, at first, but then you understood the groove of that thru their past marriage they both built businesses or companies that occupied the same building, so they would often go to work and see one another or bump into each other in the elevator and such, daily life follies.
But the thing that didn't sit well with me after I was stunned by how often they still got together as Exes was, . . how often they ended their POV sections with mantras of "S/he will just move on", "This just shows how moving on is better".
. . and they kept seemingly "moving on" with LIFE but not truly living, Not even apart.
The couple is Braden and Mallory, Braden had a past childhood where showing emotions was overkill when he was little he dared to cry or become weepy and it felt weak and silly, he, literally, would shut down.
Mallory was a baby born out of wedlock to a mother who eventually contracted AIDs, and who shortly died from it, She lived in and out of foster care, so she's always never known a "forever" with the people she loves or who say they love her.
I was so curious about their marriage because it says a lot of a couple who divorces but then can manage to stay friends or friendly after that something so deeply transformative happened and they never want to let go, even though signs show they have.
They seemed to have been very bonded and loving at the start of their relationship into marriage, but Mallory had always seen herself as serving for one thing.
. . very nurturing and maternal so when she got pregnant, BINGO! she found purpose and sadly, Braden took a backburner, She stopped being a wife and dedicated herself to her pregnancy, the birth and then being their baby's mother, Barden felt left out of a lot of things, and Mallory never saw what he had to be upset over,
The tragedy happens on a night Braden had convinced his wife to give time to them and their marriage, then took her out to dinner and to a hotel room where they had an awesome night of sex.
They had left their baby with a nanny/babysitter, but tragically, this baby never made it thru the night, passing away from SIDs related death.
This, of course, fuels a lot of arguments and guilttrips, placing blame where it never belonged because their child died when they weren't there and selfishly indulging in sex and keeping their marriage intact.
But this is not to say Braden or Mallory were piling on abusive tactics to ruin their marriage, no, it was equal footing of guilt, shame, and anger.
They did couples' therapy and tried to deal with their baby's death, and it helped somewhat but not enough, The therapy gave them tools to have later on to possibly have another relationship, maybe another marriage with children, Who knows. But this consistency of them being a large part of the days of the week or weekend, to having meals and keeping each other abreast of their lives apart.
. . ech, this is where it got techy, a bit ohno because you could see it a mile away as they could not, There is still a grand scale of love there between them it's just clouded or fogged over with a lot of things they haven't let go of from still hanging on to each other.
It's why I always wish couples in romance books who break up or marriages who falter a bit to heal NEED a good enough length of time to be distant, AWAY from the other person.
It was interesting
how this, . . "Baby arrangement" between them was becoming the wakeup call needed to kick them into gear, A lot of strangeness crops up when you agree to donate sperm and then inseminate with that sperm, Braden didn't want Mallory to not know her donor, but then he kept slowly and agonizing kept attaching more of himself to Mallory's NEW LIFE, thereby encroaching on her choices and changing her mind.
This was weird from a man who at first wanted no parental control with the child, at first, . . but the more and more he considers legalities and The Future when this child is grown, . . yeah, he started thinking of consequences and decisions he made NOW being important later on as the child grew up,
This would confuse Mallory because she knew what was coming as Braden who typically backs away from hardcore emotional things, kept crawling toward her more and more to BE in his new baby's life.
It was very fascinating to watch how psychologically each of them shifted in their minds to discover how messed up their situation was, but only when it was too late.
Braden appeared to be the only one of them who dated, but he would often tell Mallory about these women weird, I know, Then during this story when Braden and Mallory meet for a meal, they BOTH have news to tell the other Mallory wants a baby and Braden is leaving San Diego to open a new branch of his office in L.
A. It's very telling how each stepbystep taken by one showed the other they HAD TO move on with life, but how they truly could never move away from each other, honestly.
Plus, the baby would keep them tied forever,
What I love about Quinn's writing is how there's a deepness to the drama unfolding, . . give you an example with how and why Mallory could not "see" herself being perfect for Braden and Braden being continuously blind to just how incompatible they were if he didn't change how he dealt with emotions and his reactions to emotional moments.
Quinn does this so eloquently in the first few chapters of Mallory's POV where she describes how during their marriage, Mallory was an emotional basket case, always simpering and crying.
. . and how Braden would shut down or plainly walk away to NOT DEAL with her weak ways, So, guess what Mallory started doing, . . she would cry alone, in another room, . . and have to turn on some kind of noise to hide her crying so Braden wouldn't hear This is a stunning reveal from Mallory later in the book but it explains why during his POV he just never understood why the therapist would often tell him to "sit in her tears".
. . and he never GOT IT, until Mallory opened his eyes to how incredibly nonemotional he could be, with shutting down and shutting out everybody and everything.
Mallory's words were just the AhHA! moment he needed to have that switch turned on in his head that told him, . . he needed to rewire his brain and his body to stop doing his old means of dealing with pain and loss and fears and anger.
hehe, there was a random scene where he actually raises his voice once and yells at her, . . and Mallory got quiet but she LIKED IT, and found it refreshing because it finally showed her Braden COULD become emotional, but it was buried so deep she had nothing there to unlock that.
It had to come from Braden himself,
A great read! Certainly an atypical exploration of a divorced couple getting a new outlook and second chance, And they really do deserve each other, And a healing for them separately and together is on the way, Really, really good.into The Baby Arrangement, I was sooo excited about the prospect of reviewing this book because while many of the emotional elements were disappointingly flat the trajectory of the protagonists' reconciliation seemed to represent a sea change for the author of sitelinkHope Street.
and then I realized Tara Taylor Quinn didn't write sitelinkHope Street,
I forgive myself for the mixup because both Quinn and Arnold write romance that skews closer to women's fiction though saying that makes me feel like I'm trying to be some kind of genre gatekeeper.
Anyway, in sitelinkHope Street, the middleaged H/h are divorcing because they mourned their dead son in very different ways, with the husband eventually cracking under the strain of his wife's depression and the lesson being "save yourself first.
" In The Baby Arrangement, thesomething couple are already divorced because the weeping wife couldn't tolerate her husband's lack of emotional support while she grieved for their dead baby and the husband couldn't endure being cut off from sex.
The baby died from SIDS on the very first night the couple arranged to be away for some sexy marital relations at a glam hotel, so they were having the hottest sex ever while the baby was home dying in a nanny's care and the guilt really put the wife off sex.
They didn't go through therapy together, but they had both gone through grief counseling separately before the divorce, and the message from his counselor had been "Sit with her.
Be willing to be in her grief with her, Let her into your grief, " Absolutely none of which he could handle, but after the rageinducing message of sitelinkHope Street, I really needed to hear that, Thank you, unnamed fictional grief counselor,
The Baby Arrangement protagonists have been divorced for three years and they consider themselves friends now, occasionally texting or phoning and meeting for a drink or a meal when they have news they need to share.
It's clear from her perspective that this "friendship" comes with compromise: she walls off her emotions from him, It's okay! She has a female friend she met in group therapy she can cry like crazy with, When the book opens, they're meeting for dinner at his instigation, and she thinks he's going to tell her as he always does that he's dating yet another woman.
I want to discuss this in more detail later, She's wrong. He plans on telling her that he is relocating from San Diego to L, A. because he thinks they need distance so they can both move on with their lives, But before he can share his news, she blindsides him: she's going to have another baby,
No, she's not pregnant, No, there's not a man in her life, She's going to be artificially inseminated and she hopes he'll be supportive of her choice because his friendship matters to her, He's conditionally supportive: he wants to be the donor, He puts out all these pragmatic reasons about knowing the father's history and yadda, but honestly it's because he's possessive and doesn't want anyone else to father her children.
This is just one of a dozen potentially emotional scenarios that falls flat because that's how TTQ rolls, She doesn't want the complication of him being the biological father, but she really wants his support, so she agrees as long as they keep it simple: he can be the donor, but he's not the daddy.
. . unless she dies, then she wants him to raise the child,
Yeah, this is going to get complicated,
Eventually he tells her about his planned move, and she is shocked, She goes forward with IVF, He goes forward with the move to Los Angeles though he'll be in San Diego once a week because he's not getting rid of his business interests there.
She gets pregnant. He starts dating Anna the L, A. architect and tells his pregnant exwife, Because that's what he does, I would say "that's what they do," but she's had no romantic relationships since the divorce because the hot hotel night while their baby died killed sex for her.
But he's an honorable guy who feels like he shouldn't have sex with Anna untilhe's told his ex about his new girlfriend andhe's told Anna about the baby.
So he asks his pregnant exwife for her opinion on how he should do that,
What! I'm having a hard time reconciling all this openness he imposes on his exwife regarding his dating habits, For the past three years, any time he has gone on a second date with a woman, he's told the heroine, So far it's all been "he dated, he fizzled, he dated, he fizzled," but before the nonthreatening pattern developed, it seems to me like the information is more punishment than courtesy.
"Look at me, moving on, woohoooo!" On the other hand, an ex in a supposedly friendly relationship with her former spouse probably wouldn't want to be blindsided by the news of a serious romantic relationship.
I dunno. Maybe the fact that he does it every, Single. Time. is indicative of his inability to assess his own emotions, EVERY woman he dated was probably not important enough to bring up to his exwife, But Anna might be, because she's L, A. and L. A. is his new life.
The heroine's response
You don't tell her, You're the donor, not the daddy, remember
Oh, about that, I think my name should go on the birth certificate, Because that way I wouldn't have to prove paternity, and it would give you peace of mind that my future wife wouldn't talk me out of taking responsibility for the child in case of emergency.
Which is also why I feel I should tell Anna,
WAIT! You're marrying Anna
Oh, not anytime soon, but I like her and the point of moving to L, A. is to move on with my life,
All paraphrased, but still, This guy
She has a sonogram and discovers she's having twins, He takes Anna to see Hamilton, The heroine has a nightmare and decides it would be best to have the father's name on the birth certificate, so she calls him in the middle of the night.
He's not alone. Awkward.
She goes through a prenatal testing scare with the twins, He proposes marriage. Yeah, things have definitely gotten complicated, but she doesn't accept because he's still emotionally detached and she doesn't want him to make her daughters feel the shame he made her feel about her emotions when she was grieving for the baby.
Ouch.
He breaks it off with Anna, The heroine breaks up with him, This awkward friendship thing Over, He accidentally! hits a dog with his SUV and discovers feelings, There's a kind of hilariously creepy scene where he shows up at the heroine's home with the dog sleeping in a travel kennel and tells her he ran it over and they have a long conversation about feelings all the while she thinks he has a dead dog in the kennel.
The dog wakes up. He proposes because he can cry now, HEA.
While I felt like the book had compassion for both protagonists, in the end the onus was on the hero to change if he wanted a relationship with his exwife.
Her change basically amounted to forgiving herself for being a wife the night her baby died, recognizing she may have shut him out of the first pregnancy, and rediscovering that she could have sexy feelings.
He has to cry. And sit with her when she cries, which goes against a lifetime he spent ducking the emotions of his mother and sisters by solving their problems instead of sitting around feeling helpless.
So the resolution feels a little unbalanced and judgmental to me, but there's a nice touch when he acknowledges that he can't promise her he will never exhibit detachment in the future.
Just that he'll try to be there and be supportive,
And honestly, after sitelinkHope Street, I needed that message, Even if it's from a different author, .