Something Like Normal, by Trish Doller

TITLE: Something Like Normal
AUTHOR: Trish Doller

COPYRIGHT: 2012
PAGES: 225
PUBLISHER: Bloomsbury

SETTING: Contemporary US
TYPE: New Adult romance
SERIES: None

When Travis returns home from a stint in Afghanistan, his parents are splitting up, his brother’s stolen his girlfriend and his car, and he’s haunted by nightmares of his best friend’s death. It’s not until Travis runs into Harper, a girl he’s had a rocky relationship with since middle school, that life actually starts looking up. And as he and Harper see more of each other, he begins to pick his way through the minefield of family problems and post-traumatic stress to the possibility of a life that might resemble normal again. Travis’s dry sense of humor, and incredible sense of honor, make him an irresistible and eminently lovable hero.

This is one of the New Adult books everyone seems to like, so I had high hopes for it. It's entirely narrated from the point of view of Travis, a 19-year-old soldier who's serving in Afghanistan. As the book starts, he's on leave and staying at his parents' house, and almost wishing he was back in Afghanistan. His father is a complete prick, his mother excuses him, and his ex-girlfriend is now his brother's girlfriend (which doesn't keep her from climbing into Travis' bed at every opportunity). Not to mention the fact that, after some very traumatic experiences in the last year, he's finding it impossible to just slot back into his old life, as everyone expects him to just do.

I suspect the only reason I didn’t absolutely love this was that I approached this as a romance novel. There is a romance, and the book does focus on it, so it’s not that I didn’t get a romance novel. It’s that the romance I got did not appeal to me at all.

The romance has Travis reconnecting with Harper, a girl whom his thoughtless actions as an arsehole 14-year-old harmed quite terribly. He pretty much can't stand to be with anyone else, but being with Harper calms something in him, and before long, they're involved. I could see what he saw in her, but I just couldn't understand why she'd want anything to do with him.

For starters, there's the infidelity, which is a bit of a hot button for me. As I mentioned earlier, Travis' ex, Paige, keeps sneaking into his bed and he doesn't throw her out. Some of these episodes happen when he's already pursuing Harper. It felt very sordid. Travis just gives in whenever Paige decides she wants to have sex with him. There’s no thought there, although he feels afterwards that he shouldn’t have done it. It’s an “it didn’t mean anything” kind of deal, and when he tells Harper about it, she forgives him pretty easily, with no explanation at all, not even a need for him to explain why he’d done it, nothing.

She really does forgive MUCH too much. The infidelity is bad enough, but the history between them is horrendous. They kissed when they were 14, and he embellished the story a bit when he told his friends (said he felt her up, that sort of thing). Fine, he was 14. But then the story got exaggerated more and more (it’s implied Paige was behind it, so clearly, she was this vicious slag even at 14), and people are soon saying Harper fucked everyone in the party, and she gets this really awful reputation, and Travis says nothing. Yes, he’s 14, but this does have a severe effect on Harper. I mean, they’re 19 in this book, and Harper says she still gets grabbed by random guys because of it, and has never had a boyfriend. She needed to make Travis suffer before she even looked at him. It really annoyed me that the message seems to be that because he’s a soldier, then he’s automatically forgiven all this.

There were other things that bothered me. Women Travis’ age are either Harper or all sluts. Nice sluts, like Amber or Lacey (Harper’s friends) or evil sluts, like Paige, but sluts, all the same. Argh!

I did like some things about the book, though. As a story of a young man coming back from war, mourning a friend and feeling completely out of place in his old life, it’s really good. Without any psychobabble, Doller shows how his experiences of war have shaped Travis and the difficulties in having changed so much when those left behind haven't. The family drama was also good. Just not the romance. I think if the focus had been on Travis, and not so much on his relationship with Harper, this would have worked much better for me.

MY GRADE: A C+.