Faux Pas by Lily Seabrooke: A Faux Pas if there ever was one
Generally it’s been a rough couple of weeks for my reading; my backlog is almost bottomless(though full of bottoms) to the point that I could unironically read for weeks at a time and not even get halfway through. The trouble is everything sucks, or at least it looks that way through my strained and goofy eyes. Some of the casualties are obvious ones, like repeated badly contrived plot events in Hearts in Motion, my not being onboard with the premise of The Arrangement because it feels like a worse version of At First Glance, The Long Way Home because it opens with the lead bitching about the woman she’s dating, All The Little Moments because I feel like the romance plot was butting up awkwardly against the dead-brother-now-his-kids-are-yours plot, and because I hate normie social interaction with a passion. Spellbound’s awful handling of trauma and abuse recovery. Still, there are some that just don’t feel good or fair.
And Then She Kissed Me should be a winner on many fronts, but I just got weirdly skeeved out by TMI descriptions of surrogate parenthood. Worthy of Love which is probably good but entirely too heavy for my liking because Holy Shit, the American prison system. Could have done At First Glance, but the subject matter is far outside my experience. Good Enough to Eat I actually enjoyed a fair bit, because JAE. I think I planned to write about it at some point but that did not happen. So finally, I have to break this streak somehow, and if you see me again I’ll probably be writing about something unbearably grim-dark and queer-fic-y.
Today’s target is a really good showcase for reliable authors not being reliable anymore, at least for me. I like Lily Seabrooke because she took a dumb concept about a fake relationship founded on reviving A) a failing restaurant and B) a failing reality TV cooking show and mushed all those idiot tropes together into Fake It, something really fun. At least, I think so. Would I even like it if I read it now? Notable about Fake It is Avery, who is Trans™ and as is so often the case in these things, a complete bottom. Point being I liked Fake It, and Seabrooke dropped a new novel(novella?) as part of the I Heart Sapphic Romance collection thing for pride this year. I was like Wow I didn’t expect that! It’s all my Kwanzas wrapped up in one!
Seabrooke must be hungry as fuck, because it’s about a restaurauntteur again. Paige is some kind of property developer living in San Fran who gets the notice that a distant uncle gave her his old diner in his will, and she should do something with it. Paige could use the cash, so she drives out to sleepy Willow Arches patch it up, flip it in a month, and gets way more than she bargained for.
What she finds is a tiny, extremely gay(seriously every named side character is some kind of queer, if only real life were this way) and terribly hostile town(ouch). Literally the instant she mentions that she’s here to fix her uncle’s old place, the whole-ass Angry Lesbians Society(her name, not mine) descends on her for some schoolyard style barely veiled bullying, and since she’s about as firm and standoffish as a wet towel, she’s only saved by the sudden, inexplicable kiss of some dyke that literally walked out of the woods.
Madison is some dyke that literally walked out of the woods, and she met Paige briefly when she needed a tire fixed and rolled onto the roadside by Madison’s cabin. Paige follows in the proud tradition of distracted simps and so is mesmerized by Madison being a muscular soft butch, which is all we’ll ever know about her physicality.
I am actually beyond sick of sapphic lit’s allergy to describing bodies and just any physical traits. It means that whenever the author does want to call on something specific, like thunder-thighs or whatever, I was probably picturing something else. In this instance, given the butchy description I gave Madison short cropped hair internally, but apparently it goes way down to her shoulders, okay. This isn’t really a massive problem, but it’s been a constant bugbear for ages and ages, I’m sick of it. But I’m also getting ahead of myself.
Madison is basically that one top that every lesbian in town either wants to get with or has done, but she’s been reclusive in the woods for a while and she wants people off her back about it this month(June!) so she makes an offer to Paige; they will make out a bit in public and cohabit while she is here. Pretty cash-money arrangement if you ask me.
Madison instantly notices that Paige has never had dirt under her fingers, cannot cook, cannot revitalize a restaurant, or really do anything on her own. In fact, Paige is oblivious to the point of almost-comedy, ignorant of social norms to what you’d describe as a fault, terminally unable to stand up for herself and prone to stumbling over her own words or even just not speaking intelligibly under duress at all. So, Madison gets involved, seemingly as a result of not wanting to see Paige fail constantly all the time, and the two set out to fix up uncle man’s diner, Faux Pas. Title drop moment.
The basic gist for most scenes between our leads is that the reader gets to watch Paige attempt something, be it renovations or sweet potato chili curry or being anything less than bloodied enemies with the town gays. Madison laughs good-naturedly about it, maybe teases her a bit, but they bounce off of eachother and joke around because Paige is a well of boundless optimism, and they work on it together. The arcs are very simple; Paige learns to be more confident and stand up for herself, and Madison comes out of her shell in various different ways.
Faux Pas’ secret sauce is the character interactions though, which sounds right up my street. Paige borders on seeming actually dumb at times, but her relentless positivity, blunt approach to conversation, frequently awkward word-spaghetti info-dumps and tendency to be funny accidentally seem to win everyone over; accepting their help is part of how she improves.
Faux Pas also kind of goes down the drain here. Not in an objective plot or character sense, like a Something to Talk About, but in a very subjective “feel” sense. More subjective than usual, anyway.
If, like me, you are keen-eyed and always looking for representation in a way that’s coloured by your personal experience and bias, you might have raised an eyebrow at those last couple paragraphs. Call me insane, but I was really left thinking that Paige is deliberately coded as neurodiverse. Which kind? I dunno, autism spectrum? ADD/ADHD? Could be many things, but thankfully since the book won’t put a label on it, I don’t have to either.
Now, I am by no means discounting the existence of extroverted, sociable Neurodiverse people. Hello out there! Must be fun! To me, though, neurodiversity is isolating in and of itself. You can see the same kind of sentiment all over sub-reddits dedicated to the topic, and just generally – the world is built by and for neurotypicals on every level, it is a struggle to exist within it. In that way, Faux Pas feels(see? FEELS) kind of like a bizarro fantasy world, in which putting the proverbial foot in your mouth, or info-dumping on someone for an hour because they said something semi-relevant to a wikipedia rabbit hole you spent hours reading last night, earns you a small oh-you’re-so-quirky! and a friendly pat on the head. Instead of, you know, the kind of horrified stares one usually gets from not masking in public. It’s amazing, the variety of terrified faces could fill several posters for horror films!
The flat truth of it is that the majority of people are pretty crap. Call it edgy if you want, but I’ve gone through the routine too many times. Do mask; you end up absolutely exhausting yourself every time you speak and for what, to try to foster a frail, shallow connection with a person built entirely on false pretenses because if you don’t mask, they back away slowly like they’re being faced with a rabid animal? Cool. The only solution(I find, at the least) is to opt out of neurotypical society as much as possible, which is probably one of many contributing factors in why autists don’t go outside much. It’s also fucking hot and sweaty out, which sucks. I want my big jacket back, please.
The end result of all this specifically is that every time the novel plays on Paige failing to form coherent sentences in public(really quite traumatic in meatspace) for a laugh, or has Paige casually break social norms and leave the normies in the room slack-jawed(again for a laugh), or anything of the sort, I think to myself GEE THAT MUST BE NICE! On one hand it’s hard to dislike Paige’s bubbly, carefree, positive demeanour, and I actually really did enjoy Faux Pas in general. I enjoyed that Madison might have a lot more going on with the town than is obvious at first glance, and that the fake-relationship thing is basically a joke-bit and does not get in the way of the plot like it can in other books. It’s genuinely touching to see Paige grow fonder of and more caring for the town, its citizens and Faux Pas in general, and Seabrooke does a fairly solid job of redeeming those angry lesbians, making real characters out of them.
But as the page count dwindled, I found myself more and more bitter and shitty that the actual reality of openly exhibiting such non-neurotypical behaviour is completely fucking sidelined. I’m aware it’s entirely possible that an ND subtext/coding is not at all what the author intended, but we’re here, aren’t we? Paige reads, to me, as some form of neurodiverse. Even if she didn’t, though, I’d stand by what I’ve said because her behaviour and demeanour is the focus, and she gets off socially scott-free from shit that would be horribly traumatic in any room full of fucking normals
It’s probably considered poor form, or even a faux pas(haha) to say things like this, but too bad. I’m driving the blog car. Subjectivity or no, Faux Pas is a well-constructed, fun to read, bright and bubbly novel that left me stewing and shitty. I kind of hated it, so catch me back here for something considerably more grim.
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