Title: That Week in Acapulco
Author Name & Publisher: Gaëlle Cathy
Publication Date & Length: December 9th 2015- 241 pages
Charlene “Charlie” Campbell never used to believe in true love. The only time she did, it turned into a gigantic, life-altering mistake. So she decides to spend Christmas of 2014 in Acapulco, hoping to relive her younger days of carefree living and one-night-stands.
Alecia Moore, on the other hand, believes in true love because she found it once…and lost it. She flees another depressing Christmas in Seattle and the overwhelming attention of her close friends and family.
While the sun and sand can’t shake her blues away, a chance meeting with Charlie does, in unexpected ways.
Will it be enough for Alecia to open her heart again and for Charlie to bet once more on something she doesn’t believe in?
BONUS STORY : Happy New Life (aka Emma’s Story)
Find out what’s next for Emma…
I’m a little at a loss with this book. I like the romance between Charlie and Alecia. Both are struggling with their last relationships. We learn quickly that Alecia is still trying to get over the death of her previous partner. There’s a combination here about it being the right time, and something indefinable about Charlie that draws Alecia into things she’s not sure she’s ready for. At the end of that week, they each go their separate ways, not expecting to see each other again. After all, they live on opposite sides of the country. But neither can stop thinking about the other. They start popping in on each other unexpectedly.
It’s when Alecia makes a surprise visit to Charlie that things go off the rails for me. Finally we get the story of Charlie’s previous relationship and wow, it’s a doozy. I think that there should have been some mention or warning about this before I picked the book up, but at the same time I’m not sure that’s something you should put on the outside blurb. Because Charlie’s previous relationship involved incest. Charlie was adopted, and never knew her biological mother, and when an attractive vibrant woman walks into her factory, she falls for her. In the course of falling in love, Emma’s mother confesses to a secret – she’d been raped as a teenager and given away the baby, and never told anybody about it. Charlie and Emma are half-sisters.
It doesn’t bother me that they fell in love, and it doesn’t bother me that they got together before they knew. It bothered me a lot that they kept having a relationship after they knew they were related. It was something I just couldn’t get past. Logically, the taboo of incest was about not combining recessive genes that resulted in genetic flaws that affected the viability of offspring. Illogically, it has been so ingrained in society, and incidentally in me, that I have a very visceral reaction to the idea that they kept having a sexual relationship after they discovered the truth. And as for Alecia, I’m not sure that in her place, I could forgive walking in to the scene she walked in on.
Quite frankly, I liked the romance in this book, but the story was overshadowed for me by the crossing of the taboo. On the other hand, I certainly haven’t stopped thinking about it. There was an additional story in this book that looks like it tells Emma’s story, from after her break up with Charlie. I think I’m going to have to read it.
~Amy P
Apart from writing, reading and music but mostly my many cats take a lot of my time and I love that. I read, I take long walks in the mountains. I also partake in actions to stop bullfight, animal testing and other mistreatment of animals.