Narrated by Ryan West
Going Down Easy is the first full length novel in Erin Nicholas’s new Boys of the Big Easy series, featuring single parents. There are also a free prequel and a free short story available, although be warned, some of the continuity doesn’t quite line up.
Gabe Trahan is a single dad to Cooper, aged 5. He and his brother, Logan, co-own Trahan’s Bar in the French Quarter of New Orleans. Addison Sloan, a restoration architect, is a single mother to Stella, also aged 5. She is a New York native but has been working for a weekend a month in NOLA for the previous six months and has just taken a job there. Gabe and Addison have been hooking up for those NOLA weekends but have kept things non-personal, sharing only insignificant information about each other – and certainly not sharing that they each have a child.
When Gabe discovers that Addison has moved to NOLA, he is hurt that she hadn’t told him but also delighted because he wants more from Addison than a weekend a month and the distance between New York and New Orleans was too great for a workable relationship in the long term.
The Gabe I met in the prequel story, Easy Going, was a nice guy – sexy and charming in a roguish way but the Gabe of Going Down Easy was self-indulgent and often a jerk. The novel begins with Addison deciding that she needs to break things off with Gabe now they live in the same city. She does not want a relationship. She does not want more children and she does not want to parent another man’s child. Those are all valid choices but Gabe is having none of it. Addison’s wishes are unimportant. He knows what’s best.
When Gabe confronts Addison at her workplace where he is attending a meeting regarding restoration work on Trahan’s, he is completely inappropriate to her in front of her boss, making it clear that he and Addison had a sexual relationship. The narrative shows he knows he’s being a douche but he does it anyway. Addison is upset but Gabe is never really called to account for it.
Then, Gabe anonymously invites Addison to his single-parent’s support group and proceeds to talk about her to the group in front of her. Again, he is not called to account. In fact, his bad behaviour pays off for him every time. He is high-handed and selfish, despite his oft-stated desire to look after the people around him and keep them safe.
Later, he uproots Cooper’s life to make himself feel better and I wanted to stab him in the eye with a fork.
Addison started off the book as a feisty go-getter but in her dealings with Gabe she took on the role of doormat. And, of course, she ended up wanting all the things Gabe wanted and that made me want to scream. There could have been a really interesting conflict but, no. Argh.
The end of the book becomes more of a story about how hard and awesome it is to be a parent and I lost interest in it. I’m a mum myself and I love my son and I don’t mind kids in romance books at all. But I wanted to listen to a romance, not a parenting book.
The narrator, Ryan West, did a pretty good job considering I disliked the hero early on and my opinion of him never really improved. His child and female character voices were well done, as was his tone and pacing.
There was a part in the book where he got a character’s name mixed up but other than that the audiobook was technically sound and well-produced. Mr. West is not responsible for the scene where Cooper and Gabe tell Addison and Stella they need to go home when they are all, at the time, in Addison’s house. (Ahhh, continuity.)
Maybe if I’d listened to Going Down Easy a few years ago I could have given some of Gabe’s behaviours a pass but in the age of #MeToo I struggled with his continual dismissal of Addison’s stated wishes. I want to be clear; there was no sexual misconduct – Gabe was very much about consent and agreement when it came to physical intimacy. In fact, in bed (or against the wall, or in the shower, etc) the pair were extremely compatible – those interactions were the best parts of the book – but he was guilty of inappropriate behaviours at her workplace and within the support group and he regularly rode roughshod over what Addison said she wanted in a relationship. That’s not okay with me and I could not like him for it. What made it worse is that he never changed his behaviour. He never suffered a negative consequence for it.
If not for the good work of Ryan West I don’t think I could have finished the book in fact, so he gets high marks for narration under the influence of a dickish lead character.
I’m still generally a fan of Ms. Nicholas’s work and I’ll be reading and listening to more of her books but Going Down Easy did not live up to the title for me. I found it very difficult to swallow (har har) Gabe’s BS.
Kaetrin
Buy Going Down Easy by Erin Nicholas on Amazon
