WEEKLY ANNOUNCEMENTS:
Cassidy didn’t get any sunburn while she was in Arizona.
Cassidy cried at work last week.
Cassidy got to eat a lot of zeppoles on Friday night.
Cassidy finally got to watch the new Haikyu movie in theaters.
Capfriendly has been sold and will go dark after the draft. Isabella won’t recover.
Cassidy
Hello JTPC!! It’s good to be back. It’s always so weird when I don’t spend some time a week reading/writing one of these posts. But I’m back now!!
And as promised, this week we read the next book in Kiera Andrews gay amish romance series. A Clean Break picks right up where A Forbidden Rumspringa ends. Isaac and David have made it to San Francisco to stay with Isaac’s brother, Aaron, who has been shunned from the community since leaving the church over a decade ago. They both now have to adjust to living in a world that is so terrifyingly different from their community in Minnesota. Isaac decides to go back to school while David sets up a carpentry business in San Francisco. Isaac is thriving in this new setting, while David is struggling. He can’t let the guilt of leaving his family behind go. This leads to conflict between the two of them before things get worse.
Kiera Andrews somehow always manages to surprise me. Like I could not have guessed where she would be taking Isaac and David in this book. Like??? This book started a bit slow, but the last 50 pages???? WILD.
Isabella
I genuinely am in a state of shock. I just finished the book and I’m stunned. Kiera WHAT?
The last 50 pages of this book are just wild. Everything that comes before that is just them slowly acclimating to non-amish living. There’s tension there, and it did make my stomach hurt, but it was a slow character study. THEN BAM. JUST WHEN YOU WERE MEDITATING ON WHAT THEIR RELATIONSHIP LOOKS LIKE? JUST WHEN YOU THOUGHT YOU WERE SAFE? THE PLOT EXPLODED.
LIKE???? I was almost afraid I was going to have to get on this post and say I was bored. That Andrews had let me down after a crazy first book in the series. Like obviously David and Isaac were at odds with each other, but the build up to the final blow up???? Literally took 200 pages to get to. The slow burn on that was crazy. The pay off? Delicious.
A summary of the last 50 pgs by Isabella:
Just imagine reading about Isaac going to school and David building a table for 200 pages and then you get ALL OF THAT?? There are so many things in that summary I would have never guessed would happen. Kiera Andrews your mind.
THE PAYOFF???? I’ve never seen a slow-burn done like that. The execution? I felt like I was watching olympic gymnastics. The landing…
Kiera Andrews…your mind????????????????
I’m sure we will circle back (sorry, Ali, for the corporate language you so hate) to those last 50 pages, but to speak of the first part of the book: it’s quite slow. And that’s a huge departure from the first book, but I think that deliberate slowness with the storytelling filled in the gaps I was pointing to in our review of book 1. I really did feel like I now can fully see the portrait of both David and Isaac.
Right, like I might have been bored at first, but I do think slowing down the pace of this story for a little bit was the correct decision. So much happened in the first book that we didn’t really get to know Isaac and David. And this is something we talked about in the last post, where so much of the book was dedicated to sex scenes (and still is in this one, I don’t want to lie here) that a lot of scenes where they get to know each other are missing. But that’s not the case here at all. We really get to see David and Isaac grow and settle, both with themselves and with their relationship while they’re in Minnesota. I liked the balance that was provided between the two books. The first and second book really complimented each other here.
Oh you’re right. Let’s be honest: sex scenes are STILL made the top priority in this book. We can’t ignore that.
The books did complement each other, yeah, and, though I’ve yet to start the third book, I have a sense that this book is a bridge book. We get to understand David’s perspective (book 1 is from Isaac’s) in a way that made me really sad? It’s not a clean cut. They’re not fully relieved that they’re gone. That tension is brutal.
If this is a bridge book, where context and introspective elements are built, I think the third book is gonna be out of control.
Kiera Andrews has her priorities and insane sex scenes are at the top of her list. I will give her this, they never make me cringe so it's not like painful to read them. They're usually pretty heartfelt too.
This book was such an interesting character exploration into David. Like it would have been boring from Isaac’s perspective because he was having a great time. David???? David was MISERABLE. It was delicious, I'm sorry. Even though they were together in this book the yearning was crazy. Physically they were so close but could not have been further apart feelings wise.
I fear for the third book, I really do. Like what could she possibly have cooked up for it, I can't even begin to imagine.
RIGHT????? DAVID WAS SO MISERABLE.
This book creates such a painful dilemma: Isaac leaves the amish for so many reasons — and David isn’t the only one. David, though he had more non-amish experience, may have only left for Isaac. Without Isaac, David probably would never have left the amish community. That’s fucking brutal.
It was hard to read, my heart and stomach hurt. I was so nervous. There was a moment (prior to the last 50 pages) where I thought to myself: this might be the first romance novel where maybe they should healthily break up and get back together later. Jesus.
It was so deliciously planned out because David really only left to be with Isaac. The guilt he felt about leaving his family behind??? Obviously that was going to ruin him and by extension his relationship. Oh I absolutely was beginning to think that maybe these characters needed to break up for a bit. It would have made sense and I wouldn’t have been mad at Andrews at all if she had chosen that route.
And this book really did end on a cliffhanger. Isaac ran off to Minnesota to go see his sick brother, so they never got to resolve their huge fight. I’m assuming the next book picks up right where this one ended, so I can’t wait to see David and Isaac figure out the next step they’re going to take. As we like to say, they quite literally circled back by returning to their Amish community.
And we will circle back to the gay amish segment of JTPC next week.
What Else Has Cassidy Read This Week Reviewed By Emojis?
- Barda by Ngozi Ukazu - ‼️🤭🥹
- You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine by Alexandra Kleeman - 🤔🙃😵💫
- Motheater by Linda H. Codega - 😧🫣🥳
- The Most Wonderful Crime of the Year by Ally Carter - 😴
Isabella here, where does cassidy even find books called the most wonderful crime of the year