I didn't want to think, so I read Pole Position

So today I’m talking about Pole Position by Rebecca J. Caffery. I picked this one up from Gay’s the Word as well, and it was one that I’d just seen sat on the shelves for ages. Its cover is one of those where you can tell it’s just straight up romance and there’s not really anything else going on, and to be honest? That’s exactly why I read it – I was just in the mood for straight up romance after a couple of Dragon Age books.

The blurb says that Kian Walker has always been the golden boy of motorsport. The four-time Championship winner has racing in his DNA – his father was a legend on the track, just don’t let him catch you comparing the two. As reckless and unreliable at home as he was behind the wheel, there’s nothing Kian wants less than to be just like his dad. Enter Harper Jones. This year’s rookie called up to compete with the big boys – and Kian’s new teammate. Cocky, hot-headed and with a reputation for breaking as many hearts as he does track records, Harper’s the opposite of Kian in every way. But when the season starts, there’s no getting away from him…

I don’t know why, but this book gave me American vibes. The names Kian and Harper give me American vibes. Then my brain is blown clean open with I read the words, “the muppet”, and someone who “bloody loves” doing something. Just so British. Then turns out, Caffery is British, and that’s why. Shocker. I understand that the UK does have F1 driving, but I don’t know why, I always just associate racing with the US. I don’t know what it was, there’s something about the British voice that is sometimes just so violently British, and that’s what’s Kian’s was. It felt so violently British that he didn’t feel real. And that also went perfectly with the way he spoke to his sister, also in the first chapter. I was reading their conversation about Harper being moved up to Kian’s racing partner, and the best way I can describe it was that it felt like reading fanfiction. This book in the first chapter painted Kian and Harper as stark opposites – in a very extreme way – so when the two meet, I could tell that they’d been written to be that way.

The book is dual POV. With Kian’s first chapter you see his impression of Harper – that he’s some hedonistic demon that’s a media nightmare – but then the book pops over to Harper’s POV in the second chapter and you end up seeing that he’s a huge fan of Kian and his dad. And that while he does do all of the things Kian thinks he does, he’s also just there trying to prove to his parents that he’s out here doing something. Going into this as a good tropey romance, Kian and Harper couldn’t be more different. Harper’s basically a massive slag, and Kian doesn’t know how to have fun. I’d say it’s the sunshine and grump trope, but I wouldn’t exactly call Harper sunshine.

I assumed I would get a cheesy romance even before I started reading this book, and that’s exactly what I got. So, I’m not going to go around poking all that deep into the F1 part of it, because let’s be real, it was all just fancy set dressing for Kian and Harper to get together and rail each other on the page, which, something I will say, happened less than I thought it would, given the type of book this is. This is absolutely just one of those, I don’t want to say porn without plot, because there wasn’t that much sex, but there was also no real plot either. Like, sure, they were racing around the world in this unnamed championship, but you never really saw the racing all that heavily. It was just a male/male romance with the thinnest F1 veil over it. And writing this now having read the whole thing, I think it has cemented my thought that maybe I’m just not the target audience for these romances that have limited to no plot to them. Now, don’t get me wrong, I do love a romance, but I want something to be happening. I want some goal. I will say, however, to just go back to the sex on page for a moment, that the sex, when it did happen, all seemed to be well placed, and it wasn’t just there for the sake of being there.

I need to bring up the fanfiction-feeling aspect of this book again. Because at the end of chapter twelve, and I’m just going to share exactly what it says in the book: “For the European leg of the tour. Hendersohm have sorted us a state-of-the-art luxury motorhome… Singular.” Like… Kian has won this F1 championship four times, throughout other parts of this racing tour, they’ve been put up in luxury hotels, why – if not to artificially inflict the forced proximity trope – would they get put in up a motorhome? Kian literally mentions that if he sleeps funny, he risks affecting his back and hips, prior to the motorhome being introduced. I may know nothing about the motorsport world, but why, again, would they put the guys in the motorhome? Would the team not want the two of them at their best? I really did suspend my belief for everything when I was reading this book, because I knew exactly what I was getting into, but, girl, let’s be serious for a second. And mind you, as I write this, I’m laughing to myself, because it is funny. I know it’s something I should criticise the book for, but it’s just so silly that I can’t bring myself to. With every new detail I read in this book I really just went, “What the hell, sure.” And you know what? It really helped. Because, what the hell, sure, fling the guys into a motorhome. Why not? Granted, in the beginning of the chapter after Harper mentions it’s happening, Kian mentions it’s something they’ve done with his old partners, so, once again, what the hell, sure.

Now, don’t get me wrong, this book isn’t all bad, there are definitely moments of good, and sweetness in it. And there were moments throughout where I caught a glimmer of something that could have taken the book to a genuinely deep place, for example, Harper mentioning that he is beginning therapy for his, I believe it was, abandonment issues, and struggles in relationships. He tells us that he was given up by his parents when he was six and then bounced around various foster homes. But then my issue comes in when this whole thing with him is completely glossed over. We get told he goes to therapy, or that he’s in therapy, but then there is not a single session that is shown on the page. To me, that was a major missed opportunity. Since Harper’s entire personality arc throughout the book is learning and accepting being in a serious relationship, rather than just having a one-time hookup with someone, I don’t know why we wouldn’t see at least one or two sessions, so we could have the opportunity to see the logic behind why he’s suddenly changing his attitude towards the end of the book, and the work he’s having to put into it. That was my ultimate problem, there were these nuggets of depth that were handed out, and then just never cracked open and explored.

I also noted down a couple of lines that really stood out to me. One good, one confusing. The first was quite early on and was when Harper uttered the sentence: “Fucking BBC news spoiling my fun, yet again.” Like, Mary. The BBC news strays absolutely sending me. You see that Kian and his family are all up in Norfolk, but I don’t remember where Harper was from. So did he just have beef with Look North? Or whatever the equivalent of the local BBC news was for him? But then the more negative one came from page 206. “He pushes me down onto the bed, straddling my hips as he chases my lips as I fall back into the couch.” This wasn’t the only thing like this I noticed, but it was the only one I regrettably wrote down. How can someone who has been pushed down onto the bed fall onto the couch? Unless it was a sofa bed, but???

So, ultimately, I now know I’m not the audience for this type of romance. Like I said, I want something else going on to keep me invested. Two characters falling in love with no real goal just doesn’t do it for me. Even if one of them had a goal that was actually heavily involved in during the book? That would have been fine. But I think this book delivered on what it promised to be – a M/M F1 romance – and even though I laughed at how silly some of the bits were, I’d say it was just okay. Not offensive or anything, just made no real impact on me, and now I’ve read it, I’ve got no major desire to revisit it.

Okay, bye!