Book 949: Apple-y Ever After (Apple Meadows #1) – Catherine Cloverdale

When this one landed in my inbox I got excited, a fall New England romance set in a small Vermont town obsessed with their local apple festival, sounds like the perfect summer read.* Unfortunately, it’s a big ol’ NOPE from me.

Apple-y Ever After features travel writer/photographer Adrian who has been assigned to cover the local Apple Festival and the only place left with space for him to lodge is a local B&B run by hopelessly scattered and accident-prone still grieving from the death of his fiancé, Julian. Now, this should be the perfect setup, a well-traveled city boy coming to a small town where he meets the still grieving country boy, and boom happily ever after, right? Right?

Honestly, I should’ve been prepared when I saw this note to ARC readers at the beginning of the novel:

Hello and thank you so much for picking up my ARC for this novel. I’ve done my best to catch any editing mistakes, bit [sic] if you catch any typos I would really, really appreciate if you’d let me know so I can correct them before publishing! Thanks so much, I hope you enjoy.

And it only got worse from there. That is with fully acknowledging this is an ARC/uncorrected proof where a certain number of mistakes are to be expected, but when there is a typo in your not saying let me know about Tctypos it’s never a good sign. Tangentially, it’s the same reason you should NEVER include “strong attention to detail” or “strong proofreading and copyediting skills” on your resume unless you’re 100% confident there are no mistakes because the mistake invariably appears in the very next sentence.

However, the issues I have with this novel are much bigger than a few spelling errors or misplaced commas. The more I read, the more this seemed like a rough draft that still had a few more iterations to go through. There were continuity errors, there were six pages of description for the first kiss (that was repetitive and over the top), there was stilted dialogue, and there was constant repetitive word usage (one pair of sentences had “a lot” five times and there was a set of passages where every paragraph for 3-4 pages started with “I”).

Of all of these issues, the one that bothered me most was in the second sex scene. Those scenes need to be PERFECT because MM romance and in this scene the first thing that happens is Adrian is stripped of his clothes, there’s a big deal about it because Julian keeps his clothes on, but then halfway through the scene, Adrian is “hard and aching in his pants.” It’s a passing line, and nowhere near as egregious as the butthole line from It’s a Steal, but it was enough to disrupt the scene.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been harsh overall and rightfully so but there were just too many issues that could’ve been fixed with better beta readers, a strong editor, a good copy editor, and honestly Cloverdale just reading the story out loud could’ve caught many of the mistakes and errors and improved them. Unfortunately, I can already tell Goodreads/Amazon will have plenty of 5-star reviews when at best this deserves 3-stars as it is, but that’s another story.

Side note that did not affect my review at all, I’m a little annoyed this STILL hasn’t appeared on Goodreads. It’s released July 1 and I’m writing this early on the morning of June 30 and it’s still not on there. As someone who uses Goodreads dedicatedly to track all my books and the added editing and quality issues, I really should’ve stopped after the first chapter, DNF’d this, and given the feedback to Gay Romance Reviews.

Recommendation: The premise of the story isn’t bad and there were moments of delight in the story (the sunrise apple picking and some of the minor characters), but overall this story could’ve been 5-10x better if there were more honest beta readers if Cloverdale read the story out loud to hear the stilted dialogue, and if she hired a mediocre copy-editor at minimum. It could’ve been even better than that if she worked with a decent editor who could’ve spotted most of the issues. I took a chance trying a new author with a great premise but got burned. I’m back to that question of do I blame Gay Romance Reviews for having little-to-no quality control or do I blame the author? Ultimately, I was disappointed and doubt I’ll read Cloverdale again or at the very least will need to sample a chapter to see if many easy-to-fix/catch issues are remedied before I try again.

*I received a copy of Apple-y Ever After via Gay Romance Reviews in return for my honest opinion. No goods or money were exchanged.

Opening Line: “The waves crashed over white sun-bleached sand, and I sighed deeply.”

Closing Line: “‘Come on, sweetheart. Let’s enjoy the Apple Festival so we can remember how we fell in love all over again.” (Whited out to avoid spoilers, highlight to read.)