Payton Kendall and J.D. Jameson have worked together at the same law firm for 8 years. And they’ve hated one another the whole time. When the firm lands a high-profile client, Payton and J.D. are forced to work together. But then they learn that only one of them will be offered a partnership with the firm and it becomes an all-out war.
Let me say that I adore Julie James. I love her books, I love how she writes about lawyers, and I really loved her FBI/US Attorneys series. I’ve seen this book pop up on multiple lists of books to read so I checked it out from the library.
First off, this book was written in 2009 and, for me, it has not aged well. At least in the first half of the book, I did not find the characters to be people that I wanted to read about in 2022.
J.D. is a good ol’ boy in the boys club at the firm. He thinks nothing of scheduling golf outings to the men’s only county club. He’s angry because the firm has decided they want to increase their female partners by 10% in the next year. He thinks that men have to work twice as hard as women to get ahead because of reverse discrimination and that if it comes down to either him or his female colleague getting promoted to partner, the woman will get the promotion purely because she’s a woman. When Payton is named in an article about “40 Women to Watch Under 40” he remarks that if there was a “40 Men to Watch Under 40” list, everyone would cry discrimination but it’s okay for women to have a list just for themselves. I learned all this about J.D. in the first 20% of the book. At this point, I was thinking there was no way he could redeem himself to become the hero. The only things he has going for him is that he’s hot, he’s good at his job, and his dad is an a-hole.
Payton is a little better. She also works hard and is great at her job. She’s a feminist, a vegetarian, and her relationship with her mom is not the best. And that’s all we know about her.
What we do know about every character is whether they are a Republican/conservative or a liberal. Payton is constantly calling J.D. a Republican. She also has a friend who’s a conservative and she’s always wondering if she can talk about certain things with her because she’s a conservative. J.D. consistently brings up that Payton is a liberal and feminist. I’m just not sure why this was so important for the readers to know and, especially reading this in our current political climate, it really felt over the top.
Additionally, I did not think that Payton and J.D. acted like lawyers in their 30s, who are about to make partner at their firm. Instead, they play these pranks on each other and sabotage each other, to the potential detriment of their job and clients. It’s one thing to play a harmless prank, but when you deliberately ruin someone’s suit and they have to be in court in the next 5 minutes and it’s going to reflect badly on themselves and their client, that’s going too far in my opinion. I really could not believe that these people were eight years into their careers.
This book is definitely an enemies-to-lovers book. Payton and J.D. loathe each other and it is clear in every interaction. But, as we learn, their reasons for hating each other boils down to a simple misunderstanding, and once they’ve resolved that misunderstanding, everything is a-okay. Never mind that these two people have despised each other for 8 years. Everything is all good now that they’ve cleared up the confusion.
Look, I can kind of get behind that because their loathing always seemed to be undercut with sexual tension. But what I can’t get behind is that there is zero resolution/change in J.D.’s character. It was like the author completely forgot that he was a raging sexist in the first half of the book because it’s all forgotten once he has resolved his differences with Payton. I want to know, does he still think that women get everything handed to them because they are women? Does he ever apologize to Payton? There was just zero character development. These people were the same characters they were on page 1, except they are now dating each other.
Honestly, I probably would have loved this book if I read it in 2009 when I was 30. But reading it in 2022, it did endear me at all.
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