“Chastity O'Neill is the youngest child, and the only daughter of the rather famous Eaton Falls, NY O'Neills. Her father and her four brothers all work in emergency services, the majority of them being firefighters. She also has one sorta-brother, Trevor Meade who was absorbed into the family late in his teens when his family imploded after his sister's death. Chastity has a history with Trevor. He is her first love, her only real love, and the guy who she really can't afford to love because if it goes wrong, it will all go really, really wrong with everyone she loves. Once, back in college, they had a short, emotionally charged fling, but came to their senses afterward and since then it's been repress, repress, repress. We're friends. Just friends. And Chastity in the midst of her huge (physically and numerically) family is just one of the guys.
I confess; I love the friends-to-lovers plot. Partly because it allows a romance to start with already developed feelings between the leads, but also because there is usually more than a touch of unrequited love angst mixed in. This one has both in excess, although the unrequited emotions are more perceived than real. They are really, really perceived, though.
I really loved Chastity as a character, and I am not partial mannish heroines. Chastity isn't precisely masculine, but at nearly six feet tall, she is a big, strapping girl, capable of dwarfing most men she meets. She is also unrepentantly athletic. She rows, she runs; she leaves guys in the dust. She has a geek streak, harboring a significant obsession for Tolkien and the Lord of the Rings trilogy. But while she's strong and generally unintimidated, she has some chinks in her armor. She can't stand the sight of blood; it causes her to faint (especially noticable in a family of emergency workers). She's conscious of her physical uniqueness, and she's a little socially clumsy. All of this give a faint Chick Lit flavoring to the book. Chastity is a fish only returning upstream - she has yet to feel comfortable in the waters of her destination. Her career as a newspaper writer is an anomaly in the family. She isn't broke, but she's not financially secure yet, either. And she'd really like to get married.
Skimming through what I just wrote, I have to admit this description still wouldn't get me to pick up this book. But, see, it's funny. Chastity is so drily self-deprecating, so conscious of the irony in her life, and her first-person POV is a joy to read. Having just finished watching all three of the Lord of the Rings movies, I found her lustful obsession for Aragorn hilarious, not annoying. Her family has problems, but they are funny too in their interactions with each other. And with her strange looking mutt, Buttercup. Dogs, family problems, Lord of the Rings. Oh, I was highly amused.
The rest of the review is here:
http://grerp.blog-city.com/just_one_of_the_guys.htm”
