Book Review: Yours Cruelly

Title: Yours Cruelly
Author: Winter Renshaw
Genre: Romance, Fiction

What It’s About: Stassi is out and about with her roommate, Madison, and her best friends, Tenley and Campbell at a local bar in Sapphire Shores. Madison is trying to convince Stassi to pick up the guy who has been eyeing her all evening, but Stassi does not want that. Instead, she gets a message on a dating app from a guy she had swiped right on—a Doc Mansfield. She realizes that it is Alec Mansfield, her twin brothers’s best friend growing up, the guy she had a crush on, and the guy who made her life hell, being behind the Yours Cruelly letters making fun of her, and also an anonymous phone number stringing her along until homecoming, and never showing up for her. She does not want to talk to him, but he offers to give her an apology, and Madison replies on her behalf as to when she should meet him.

Alec is surprised that she agreed, but is happy to meet up with her—he had never been able to get Stassi out of his head since he moved away to North Carolina, where his father was arrested for stealing money from his clients. He had since gone to MIT, and become and Emergency Room doctor. Recently, he took up an ER Doctor position near Sapphire Shores, because he wanted to be back in Maine.

They meet up, and Alec never manages to make the apology because they only go so far as talking about what they’ve been up to, and Stassi does not want to talk to him. It turns out that they live next to each other, and so they share an uber that night to the complex. When Stassi tries to get into her apartment, she breaks her key, so Alec offers her to stay at his place—which is still full of boxes. Instead, they end up having sex, and both enjoy it, though the next morning Alec is sad to leave her for work while she’s sleeping. He leaves her a note and gives her a phone number to call. When Stassi wakes up, she finds it, and wanders around his room looking at different things in the boxes, before making her way over to her apartment when the locksmith arrives. Then she just avoids him for the next couple of days, until Alec makes his way to Ted’s Pizza, and waits for her. Her coworker and Ted’s wife takes care of him that night and sends him off on his way, while Stassi sneaks out. Alec eventually tries to get Stassi’s attention by buying her a book—Doctor Zhivago—1st edition, and signed. Stassi thanks him, but she’s already on her book starting with a D.

Eventually, Alec runs into one of Stassi’s brothers and they talk, and then into Stassi’s mom, who invites him for Sunday dinner. She gives Alec a call and asks him if he could bring Stassi with him, because she worries about her. Then she calls Stassi to tell her that, while Stassi is preparing for the meetup and she burns the pies. Alec shows up to the family gathering without Stassi, and Stassi separately arrives with store-bought pies. During the conversation, as they’re all catching up, Alec reveals to everyone that his father is in prison for swindling investors out of their hard-earned money. Stassi feels bad for him, realizing that his home life was never great—and she leaves the house early.

They do end up talking and have sex a second time. And then Stassi comes home from a doctor’s appointment, and wallows. When Madison finds her, she tells her that she’s pregnant—several weeks it seems, as if the condom might have broken. Stassi invites Alec to meet, and he thinks that they are going on a date, to talk, but she invites him in, and reveals to him that she’s pregnant and she’s keeping it. He agrees to her terms, but she tries to shut him out. Alec steps up though, and takes her to her first appointment with a doctor that Stassi has been with for years—the same one who delivered her—and they hear their baby’s heart beat for the first time, holding onto each other.

Slowly, Stassi moves into his apartment, and they spend time together, becoming a couple as they’re navigate the pregnancy. She visits her mom alone, and her mom quickly figures out that she’s pregnant and that it is Alec’s, telling her that Alec has always loved her, even when they were kids and he pulled pranks on her. Her mom suggests that they tell the whole family at Sunday dinner, when they are ready. Alec meets up with Camila—his ex girlfriend, who is now one of his coworkers, having divorced her husband—at a burger joint. She shows up looking extremely dressed up and he tells her that he’s not going back with her, that this isn’t a date, but that he wants her to back him up about Jonathan, because she was there that night. One of the twins walks in and sees the two of them talking, with Alec making a quick exit.

After week 12, they do—and the reactions from both Adian and Cooper are negative. Especially because one of them had seen him out with Camila the other night, though Stassi and Alec clarified that it wasn’t anything romantic; he had been there to clear up the air with the girl. Their father tries to take them into the basement to talk like men, but the twins kick him out, and lay into Alec that they’ve always thought he was not worthy of their sister. It becomes clearer to Alec that they liked Jonathan over him even after all of the crap that Jonathan had done. They blame him for Jonathan’s death—something that he blames himself for as well, as he had bought the alcohol and gotten the guy drunk on purpose because he had seen that he was going to cheat on Stassi, yet again. The alcohol did incapacitate him, because Jonathan had fallen asleep on the couch, but then he disappeared when Alec went to take a leak. He was later found dead, having drowned in a nearby body of water.

Stassi speaks to her mom, who recommends that she speak with her brothers to mend the rift. When Alec returns he finds her missing, and in her old apartment. She reveals that her brothers told her that he was the reason that Jonathan had died—as Alec had gotten alcohol for the party. Alec tells her that Jonathan was going to cheat on her again, and while he did give him alcohol, it was to make sure that he wasn’t going to cheat—he offers her to call Camila to verify this information, as Camila had been there with him when Jonathan had boasted about cheating on Stassi. Stassi needs space, but she does call Camila and finds out that what Alec had said was true—that Jonathan had cheated on her with half of Camila’s friends—and later Stassi visits his grave, to tell Jonathan that she’s done and over him.

Three months later, their daughter is born, and Alec decides to stick around in the hospital room with Stassi, and their daughter, Ever. Eventually Stassi and Alec marry, with Stassi’s brothers coming around to the idea of them being together, though one of them cannot stop bringing it up. It is now 5 years later, when they take their daughter to a beach picnic along with her cousins and the rest of the Hutton clan. They watch as the twin boys destroy their daughter’s castle, and they realize that Stassi has always thought it was Alec who had destroyed her sand castle, when in reality he was trying to fix it. Stassi is now pregnant with their second child, and is a stay at home mom for Ever, while Alec has been promoted as the Department Head. He has the family he had always dreamed of.

My Thoughts: I really enjoyed this book a lot more than the first one in the series—this one has more spice, and tension than the first one, where the couples had an arranged marriage and didn’t really have any sort of relationship building. In this one, at least Stassi and Alec have a history, and she pushes him away while he tries to get back into her life and tell her that he’s always had something for her, but he just went around showing it the wrong way. I also liked the fact that Stassi got pregnant, because I feel like it’s something that is a very real possibility in all of these romance stories, but for some reason no author ever touches upon that in their books, so this was refreshing to see. A fun, quick read!