My Fair Brady is the easy romance I needed

 

Today I’m talking about My Fair Brady by Brian D. Kennedy, author of A Little Bit Country. I remember reading the latter, and remember it being about people working in a Dolly Parton-esque theme park – or something to that effect. But this is really all just to say that after Camp Damascus and Desert Echoes, I felt like I wanted something that was just going to be straight up romance and wouldn’t need me to use my brain too hard. Hence why I’ve gone with this.

The blurb says that Wade Westmore is used to being in the spotlight. So when he’s passed over for the lead in the spring musical, it comes as a major blow – especially when the role goes to his ex-boyfriend, Reese, who dumped him for being too self-involved. Shy sophomore Elijah Brady is used to being overlooked. Forget not knowing his name – most of his classmates don’t even know he exists. So when he joins the stage crew for the musical, he seems destined to blend into the scenery. When the two have a disastrous backstage run-in, Elijah proposes an arrangement that could solve both boys’ problems: If Wade teaches Elijah how to be popular, Wade can prove that he cares about more than just himself. Seeing a chance to win Reese back, Wade dives headfirst into helping Elijah become the new and improved “Brady”. Soon their plan puts Brady centre stage – and he’s a surprising smash hit. So why is Wade suddenly less worried about winning over his ex and more worried about losing Elijah?

Right in the beginning, Wade overhears two girls talking about him, thinking he’s cute, so he flirts with them, and then tells his friend, Ava, that flirting with everyone is his thing. They’re also at one of the top private schools in Minnesota. Good for them. There’s also this hint that two weeks after Valentine’s Day, he’s trained himself not to look at his regular table and to his ex-boyfriend, Reese, who we shortly find out gets the lead over Wade in My Fair Lady that their school is doing. But woe, drama, the other lead in bestie Ava, Av-stie. The POV then flicks over to Elijah who just has no friends. RIP to that. But he’s got a crush, or I think he wanted to be friends, with this guy, Connor, in his year who is also gay. Elijah is also horrendously awkward. He very much gave me the vibes of a more typical YA romance protagonist. And I also found him a lot easier to route for from the off. Although, in that, Wade, despite being conventionally attractive, was definitely setting up for things in the future as you did see him wanting to apologise to Reese for something.

Now, I love romance. And I loved that I could tell basically what the entire plot was going to be just from the blurb. Like I said, I wanted something that would be easy, and without spoiling it, it was. I didn’t always have all the time that I wanted to read this book, and I think had I not been working so much, I would have probably read this book much quicker than I did. As I was reading, this was one of those books where I just found myself not looking at the page numbers until I thought, “Maybe I’ll check”, and then suddenly twenty or thirty pages would have gone by.

While I was expecting this book all to be an easy read, there was one singular section where I had to stop myself because I saw Elijah in a situation that was eerily identical to one that I was in when I was younger. And it wasn’t just the him being awkward of it all, like that’s vaguely relatable to everyone. It was a situation he found himself that was basically exactly, note for note, something I experienced. And I’ll just spoil it – not literally all of it but – he’s going to sleep, or hook up, with someone and he’s thinking to himself how he doesn’t want to do it in the moment, but he doesn’t want to say no because he’s got such a low opinion of himself he’s thinking he should be thankful someone even wants to do it with him. So he doesn’t say no, but he doesn’t want to do it. I read that and just had to stop mid-chapter because I was like, “Oh, that’s the very thing that happened with me.” Elijah is a sophomore in this book, so I had to Google what that meant in terms of age, but it meant he was fifteen/sixteen. I could not imagine going through that at that age. For me, it happened in university, so I was an adult, and my brain was more developed, but, again, I couldn’t imagine how damaging something like that would be at Elijah’s age. Was it damaging to me? Yes, but I imagine it would have been worse at sixteen.

I do always find it odd when I read a book like this, one that’s so heavily centred around theatre, and that is solely down to the fact that I am not a theatre or musical person. I haven’t seen the Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo version of Wicked, despite the fact it’s huge, and I think the most recent musical adjacent thing I consumed was either Glee, or those random musical episodes of Riverdale when that was still on. And it’s always just all so foreign to me, because the characters end up making references to musicals, and the tech that goes into it all, and every time I see them, I end up like that one meme that’s like, “What the hell, sure”. The author could be saying any old guff, or just straight up lying and I wouldn’t know.

Now to put it nicely, Wade, one of our main characters, our bestie, our Wadestie, was awful. I don’t mean that in the sense of being a character. I mean he was awful as a person. Now that sounds horrible, but I say it because his entire motivation for helping Elijah was to prove to Reese that he’s not as self-centred as he comes across. And it was so funny reading the book, because he’d keep doing stuff, not even realising how rotten and self-centred or self-serving it all was. But the thing I really appreciated was that you got to see the state of his home life, and it’s not that his home life was bad or anything. It was just more that he was the youngest of three brothers, and his two older brothers were both successful and straight, so he struggled the whole time feeling like he was never good enough, or that he needed to be the best at all times. He’s constantly there thinking he’s going to disappoint his family. And this attitude ends up leaking out to his friends as well to where he’s so obsessed with getting into NYU, he completely ignores what his other friends are thinking and feeling.

Elijah went through the motions that you’d expect him to. He was that shy kid who had literally zero friends who was then thrust, not into popularity, but into what was essentially two different friend groups. And since he’d never had more than one friend before, he went through the whole thing of not knowing how to manage the both of them, and also not really knowing how to say no to either of them. It was breaking out of his shell and becoming, as mean as this sounds, what society would say a normal teenager is like, and learning to deal with all of these new things that have come his way.

To be honest, this book was exactly what I wanted it to be when I picked it up. I wanted something that wasn’t trying to be too much, something that had a lane and stuck to it. And because of that, I had a really good time reading it. I’ll be honest, I don’t think that I actually wrote any negatives down, and that’s solely down to the fact that I just had a good time.

Okay, bye!