Thanks to NetGalley and Montlake for this read. I enjoyed it. Give me a romance where people paths cross and I am there...leading them to the same destiny.....my kind of read. The story was cute for Rowan and Delilah ( What kind of name is Delilah...read her up in the Bible).

I enjoyed the previous Therese Beharrie novel I read, which was quite romantic and had a paranormal element to it (a ghost main character). It took place in South Africa, with her being there, and I work with/for South Africans, so it was a great read for me, and I rushed out to buy more of her books, and jumped at the chance to get this, her next ARC. This one unfortunately didn’t connect with me….

It was quite slow and perhaps the subject matter just didn’t click (single dad still living with the mother of the baby though they aren’t together but she wishes they were…. Had issues with a lot happening here).

The single dads club is the brother of Delilah, Matt, coming to Rowan’s rescue (at her request), and bringing his single dad friends along - to lend a helping hand and advice they learned in their own single dad journeys. They have a great time and bond and also intervene when Rowan and Delilah start having issues.

I so wanted to love this book as much as the other of hers I read - but I still have the other books I purchased and am really looking forward to reading those, which are more paranormal (not my normal contemporary reads, but I can’t wait to get into And They Lived Happily Ever After (about a magical author). There’s probably a huge audience for this one that adores single dad romance, and I normally can enjoy them to a certain extent, but there were too many problematic plot and character issues for me to get past.

I received an advance copy from NetGalley and Montlake, and this is my honest opinion.

GENERAL INFO

Year Pub: 6/6/23

Date read: 6/9/23

Format: Kindle

Source: e-ARC- Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for a complimentary copy of this book. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own.

Page Count: 300

Setting: South Africa-Sugarbush Bay

Genre: CR, AA interests

Tropes: single parent, opposites attract, small town

Standalone/Cliffhanger/Part of a Series: standalone

HEA/HFN ending: HEA

Epilogue Included: no

Character(s)POV Spoken: H/h

BOOK DESCRIPTION

Synopsis/Plot Summary: Rowan Quinn becomes an unexpected father who struggles to connect w/ anyone. Delilah, rich heiress turned waitress offers the poor man (who's her secret crush) some help w/ his baby. Can Rowan and Delilah escape childhood trauma and make a happy family?

M/F-M/M-M/M/F-etc: M/F

Contains Cheating: No

Contains Children: yes, Rowan's newborn son- Declan Black-Quin

Flashbacks: Both remember not being good enough for their parents. Rowan felt unwanted and inadequate. Delilah feels she has to make up for her mother's sins.

Jealy/Possy/OTT H/h : no, Delilah selflessly accepts Rowan's baby mother. Delilah's brother Matt is a little protective.

Amount of Sex In The Book: none, some kissing and touching though

Overall Smex Rating: 2

CHARACTER DESCRIPTION

Hero: Rowan Quinn

Hero Description: Introverted, built his own company. Led a very regimented life until he finds out his one-night stand McKenna is pregnant. He struggles w/ the time and energy it takes raising Declan.

Hero Likability Rating: 4

Heroine: Delilah Huntington

Heroine Description: Heiress turned waitress making a new start. Goes above and beyond to help others. She's reconnecting with her older brother Matt. Their mother was arrested for fraud against innocent hard-working people. She sees Rowan w/ his baby screaming out for help.

Heroine Likability Rating: 4

Secondary characters:
Mckenna- Rowan's old schoolmate, has a high-powered job @ a nonprofit, so she leaves Rowan w/Declan.
Linda-Rowan's grandmother. She is helping Rowan w/ Declan.
Matt-Delilah's older brother kept away by their mother. He is a single dad too w/ a 15 yr., old daughter- Irene.
Geraldine-Delilah and Matt's mother, a broker who frauded hundreds of clients
Lucas and Corey-Matt's friends, members of the single dad's club
Kirsten- Delilah's friend and colleague, a single mom who lost her husband.

H /h RELATIONSHIP INFO

OW/OM/Exes: Mckenna-Her and Rowan tried to have a romantic relationship, but no sparks flew. Delilah had a bf of 3 mos. no one serious.

Cheating Before/During/Outside H/h Relationship: no

CONTENT WARNINGS/TRIGGERS
h in therapy, childhood trauma (mental abuse)

AUTHOR OVERVIEW
Therese Beharrie
New or read before & any favorites: new author

PERSONAL OVERVIEW

Overall Rating: 4

Do You Recommend This Book: yes

Will You Re-read This Book: yes

Would You Read More Books by this Author: yes


COMMENTS/NOTES: This a feel-good romance between two people looking for acceptance. They want to prove they can do things better than their parents. Rowan has no idea what raising a son means, and he needs help. I loved the sense of community and family. Everyone is so generous; I wish things could be that simple in real life. When I was younger, on my block everyone looked out for each other's kids. Now, people are scared to leave the house. Between the gun violence and Canadian fires blazing smoke in the air, this was a great escape.

I will read anything Therese Beharrie writes, and this may be her best book yet. While the single parent trope in romance novels is not really a personal favorite of mine, I really love the ways that Beharrie both deconstructed the trope and played homage to it here, at the same time. The characters are layered, relatable, and easy to root for. The HEA is deeply fulfilling and earned — can’t wait for what Therese Beharrie writes next! Really hoping we see the secondary characters get their own stories

Let me tell you something about that first kiss it had my month watering!! The tension before the kiss!? Scrumptious! The glancing!? Spellbinding! The kiss itself!? Baby I felt that kiss everywhere!! (which should probably be a sign that I’ve been single for way too long but it is what it is🤷🏽‍♀️🥲) and Lord when he opened his mouth to speak, I damn near fainted.

So the thing is about me is that I dislike slow burns but my belly doesn’t cause when they finally kiss after have the whole build the first 45% of the book, the kiss just evokes way too many feelings!!! And honestly I’m quite contradictory cause if I don’t feel those butterflies i am not rating the book 5 stars.

So long story short I really loved the second half of this book it was so cute and Rowan and Delilah’s story was so sweet!!

I really did enjoy the connection that Rowan felt with Delilah throughout this book. They meet in a coffee shop when he is going in for his morning pick me up. He brings Declan in and grabs coffee for himself and his baby's mother. Delilah can't help but feel a connection to him, even if she shouldn't. After she rescues him, they can't stop thinking about one another.
It seems as though they are destined because they just keep getting thrown together in life and even if Rowan knows his life is way too much of a mess for this, he can't help but feel a pull. As they start spending time together, will Rowan be able to get past his fears and become the man Delilah needs or will he let his fears control him?
This was a really slow burn and it had the addition of the single dad's club, which was so fun. I loved these guys and I really can't wait to read more about them.
I enjoyed this book, but the end felt very awkward to me in the grand gesture. I couldn't really understand the MMC's trauma as well as I wanted to either and I felt like there would be more drama and I usually don't look for that but it just led up to something that never came to frution, in my opinion. I will read more of this series though, because I loved so many of the side characters. 3.5 stars
Thanks to Montlake, Therese Beharrie and Netgalley for an early copy.

Rich-girl Delilah lost everything when her mother was convicted of fraud. Working as a barista, she meets single dad Rowan. She helps him adjust to life with a newborn. Is there room in his life for romance?

I love how deeply the author drilled down into these characters. Rowan struggles with overwhelm and a sense of inadequacy as a new parent. Delilah feels guilty about the life she led at the expense of her mother's clients. There's also a supportive secondary cast that gives the book a small-town family feeling. A great start to the series!

Thanks, NetGalley, for the ARC I received. This is my honest and voluntary review.

Rating: 4/5⭐️

Publication Date: June 6th 2023

Author: Therese Beharrie

Review: This was a cute slow burn. I am also not one that generally enjoys a surprise baby trope but when it came to this book I actually enjoyed it. The MC's took it by the horns and rolled with it the best they can, they came from different backgrounds and a newly single dad and former heiress waitress. Very much opposites attract. They might start out going down a different path in life but it eventually comes back to eachother.

Thank you netgalley and Montlake for the eARC in exchange for an honest review #NetGalley #bookstagram #kindle #kindleedition #eread

I am conflicted about this book. I really wanted to like it and, well. I didn’t.

In theory, it’s a straight contemporary romance set in an idyllic small town near Cape Town, South Africa. The protagonists are likable people struggling with childhood trauma, and its repercussions in their adult lives, when they happen to meet each other, and their combustible mutual attraction sends them into a tailspin.

Delilah’s reaction to discovering that the money her parents have put into her bank account comes from defrauding people who can ill-afford the loss, is to find the most direct way to return it to them anonymously. Her second big decision is to reach out to her older brother, who had moved out and away from their toxic family situation when she was still a preteen, mend some fences, and then move closer to him.

Her third choice, a direct result of guilt on top of trauma, is to remake herself into not just a good person, but a paragon: Delilah aims to become the most unselfish person imaginable. And, after a year and a half, she has mostly succeeded.

Okay, she still goes to therapy, and she still hasn’t opened herself enough for it to actually help her deal with all her emotional trauma, but at least she’s trying.

As for Rowan, I found it incredibly refreshing that, when he and Mckenna find themselves pregnant after a one-night stand, they actually communicate with each other; including hard conversations that go well beyond, “do you want to keep the baby?”

Those conversations are not in the text, but we see their fruit in the decisions they’ve made: to have the baby and co-parent it; when they realize that they need outside help, they agree to move closer to Rowan’s grandmother, since they can both work remote for the most part.

Rowan and Mckenna have little in common, and whatever fleeting sexual attraction led them to conceive baby Declan, it hasn’t translated into anything closer than respect and tentative caring for each other; which they are willing to build into an unconventional yet loving and stable family, for their son’s sake.

Rowan has fairly serious social anxiety; there’s an incident where some otherwise decent folk use his presence to poke fun at someone else, and his reaction was painfully familiar. This anxiety compounds his feelings of inadequacy, stemming from childhood trauma, because he fears that it will become an obstacle for Declan’s own development.

There are other things this book does well, such as creating a sense of community for Rowan and Delilah to move in, and adding secondary characters with lives of their own, who interact with the leads as more than props and background.

We meet Delilah’s coworkers and friends, and they have conversations about their lives, and about Delilah’s, rather than only about her and Rowan’s incipient relationship. We meet the other single fathers of the title’s club, and they talk about the challenges of parenting well while single, as well as helping Rowan with practical things like watching the baby so he can recharge, eat or sleep for a few hours.

(Aside: this book seems to be marketed as a standalone title, but there are not-so-subtle hints about at least two potential future couples here.)

So far so good, yes?

Well, not really.

I thought about prefacing this review by explaining that I don’t usually read straight contemporaries, but that’s not really accurate. What I don’t read much is genre romance without an external conflict of some kind.

It doesn’t have to be saving the world or finding treasure or surviving a plane crash (though all those are fine), but generally I prefer that there be more in my genre romance than two people rehashing their childhood trauma over and over and over in their own heads.

And that’s the big problem for me here.

By the time we are a quarter of the way into the story, the two main characters have spent a couple of pages musing about their traumatic childhoods–three times, each. These internal monologues happen throughout the novel, at basically the same length and frequency, and with little variation in both content and delivery, almost to the last chapter.

Even the banter between the two protagonists, which sometimes is just funny and other times snarky/sarcastic funny, is interrupted more than once by one of these digressions. Which, really; disrupting good banter is a crime on its own, but when there’s no discernible growth, and instead Delilah and Rowan remain trapped in their individual endless loops of trauma and misery, it gets old in a hurry.

Finally, while the small town setting is part of the story, there’s little in the text that distinguishes Sugarbush Bay from a small seaside town in, say, Georgia; only one mention of a distinctly South African dish, and one brief, oblique reference to apartheid. This may have been a conscious choice to widen the book’s marketability, but it left me wanting more in the way of local color.

Add a last minute big misunderstanding and a very public grand gesture involving literally the entire town (reading that scene made my soul cringe so hard it became a kernel–but that is obviously a personal thing, some readers adore last-minute grand gestures), and here we are: I wanted to like the book, because I like the general premise of it, but didn’t really enjoy the execution.

I will, however, try something else by Ms Beharrie, because the good parts here were *good*.

Single Dads Club gets 7.00 out of 10

I got a copy of this book from Net Galley and was delighted. I really enjoy Therese Beharrie's writing. This story was no different.

Delilah and Rowan had a really sweet story. They were both carrying a lot of baggage. As the title suggests, Rowan was a single father. I loved that he had a good relationship with his son's mother. I loved that Delilah cared about his relationship with his son and his son's mother.

The pacing of this book was great. The way their relationship developed seemed fitting. This was one time where I didn't mind the third-act breakup. It made perfect sense given who the characters are. The ending was a little bit over the top but I really enjoyed it.

This was a five-star read for me. ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

This book is really really an ode to the anxieties of single parents and dating. Delilah was such a complex character. She cared for others while working through the shame of her parents' past. There's one line that I thought hit the nail on the head "do you realize that whenever something happens to someone you care about, you take responsibility for it". I felt that because she spent so much time thinking about her impact or she wanted people to feel seen.

Rowan what an anxious baby. I particularly thought it was really interesting that we saw him struggling. Feeling abandoned to wanting to be a good father but being scared. It was interesting to read his internal thoughts of being broken, not feeling good enough, and also concerned that being a single father would ne considered baggage.

There's a lot to unpack.

I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

This story follows single father Rowan and former heiress Delilah. After a one night stand Rowan never thought becoming a father would come from that. Delilah is working at a coffeehouse and is still dealing with past trauma from her upbringing. After meeting the two share an instant attraction but Rowan is unwilling to react on that for most of the story. The fact that Rowan and his baby mother live together but are not in a relationship at all was odd to me. Even with them just trying to coparent. It took me a couple of days to get through this one which never is good for me. I just didn’t feel like I. Injected with the characters at all. Overall this one left me wanting more.

Thank you NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read this ebook in exchange for an honest review.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for providing me with an e-ARC in exchange for an honest review.

The premise of this book is pretty simple but still fun. Plus, it had a lot of potential. However, I'm sorry to say the execution was poor.

First off, we find out a lot about the characters, but I still felt like I didn't know them at all? Most of the book is just description after description of their past and overly detailed explanations for their actions and behaviors. The author tells us everything but shows us very little, so it's unnecessary to think and draw conclusions for ourselves.

Next, some of the behaviors of both main characters seemed so silly to me. These are grown adults, one of them is even a parent, but they act like dumb teens for half of the book? There are so many miscommunication situations, as well as too many instances where the author knew what needed to happen but had no idea how to get there. The result? Lazy writing that feels lackluster and unconvincing.

Still, what bothered me most was how little I felt any type of emotion while reading. The romance was boring and not at all exciting, none of the characters were interesting enough to care about, and most of them felt like caricatures with only a single recognizable (stereotypical) character trait. It was just all so disappointing and I had to force myself to finish the novel. It felt like a chore, and books should never feel that way.

All in all, I feel like this author has potential and great ideas, but the execution falls short in this one.

I love a single dad romance! And this was a really cute one that gave me all the feel good moments im looking for. Rowan is a single father, who moves to a new town with the mother of his child. These two both have a good relationship with each other and are trying to coparent a baby to the best of their abilities. In this new town, Rowan meets Delilah and she is the breathe of fresh hair he didnt know he needed. The way this relationship blossoms from friends to feelings is really well done. I love the fun and quirky single dads club and the other people in town too.

This book was a real treat. Rowan and Delilah bring some serious baggage to the table when they meet. He is a single father learning to co-parent in a new town, and she is learning to be an independent, socially realistic adult in the same new town.

It was such fun to watch them work out all the situations, with each other and with their neighbors and relatives. Their mutual attraction is yet another learning experience for them both, and there are definitely some bumps in that road. Rowan has decided a physical relationship is that last thing a single father needs, and Delilah’s past has her believing she doesn’t deserve one. The conflict is delightful.

The title refers to a group of single dads (one of whom is Delilah’s brother) who have rallied around each other in the past, and now they rally around Rowan - a posse he didn’t know he needed but definitely learns to appreciate.

Ms. Beharrie writes this story with such insight, yet it never becomes preachy or analytical. Reading this was like being able to watch and listen to their lives from just the right distance. Rowan and Delilah (great names!) are certainly characters I wish I could meet, and their story is a wonderful read.

This book was way more than I expected it to be in the best possible way. Rowan and Delilah are both dealing with a bit of trauma from their past and it definitely effects their relationship. It shows up in how Rowan parents Declan and I loved seeing him work through it. I think the book did a very good job of showing the struggles of parenthood and all the insecurities that parents have. Rowan and Delilah are really good together and I'm hoping we see more of them in future books.

I received an arc through netgalley.

Single Dads Club is a really fun book, but I think it could have been MORE. I really enjoyed the beginning, but as the book progressed, it got a little boring. Delilah is an extremely pleasant character, and unfortunately, at times it seemed that she was only being used by Rowan. I also would have liked to have seen more of Rowan interacting with the other parents. The romance is cute and it's all quite enjoyable, but it's pretty average overall.

You can make a new family!

Rowan Quinn wanted to be the best parent possible for his son Declan so he moved to Sugarbush Bay with Declan’s mother Mckenna even though they weren’t together so they could be co-parent Declan with the help of his grandmother. But most situations made Rowan very uncomfortable until waitress Delilah Huntington took him under her wing and helped to make some introduction to other single fathers.

Fallen heiress Delilah Huntington had moved to Sugarbush Bay with the help of her brother after their mother’s arrest so she could restart her life and now she wanted to help others find their place in town even if she falls in love with a single dad.

Single Dads Club is low on the romance but high on how much new parents need the help of a village to make life work make a new family.

I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book from NetGalley. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

Thank you NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review!

This was a heartwarming reading. Not only was it heartwarming but it’s also been very warm where I’m at right now and the setting in the book is also very warm so it was warm all around. Anyways, Rowan is, you guessed it, a single dad. He’s been fighting his personal demons on his own ever since he became a dad. Poor guy. Thank God for Delilah. Her name is so pretty. That’s what Rowan thought too. Delilah pretty much came into Rowan’s life out of nowhere. Who knew that she’ll be helping him with… well, everything. With his son, his anxiety, his baggage… and Rowan didn’t even know what to do with this amazing woman. In the end, they helped each other with their demons, being patient with each other, etc. The “Single Dads Club,” is so funny. If there’s a book for each of the rest of the dads, especially Matt (Delilah’s brother), I’d read them!

I received an ARC from the publisher via NetGalley and am voluntarily posting a review. All opinions are my own.
Single Dads Club is a heartfelt new contemporary romance from Therese Beharrie, and while I haven’t enjoyed the direction some of her other works have taken of late, this one was pretty great. I always love Therese Beharrie’s depiction of South Africa, and her description of the Cape Town town of Sugarbush Bay was delightful, along with its delightful cast of characters, including the titular single dads club, who I hope get their own books as well.
Both leads have complex histories and meet each other with their respective shares of baggage. Delilah is a former heiress whose mother’s past crimes resulted in her current situation, and she’s currently trying to atone for the pain her mother caused. Her quest for self-improvement and giving back is beautiful, standing out in a genre that occasionally uncritically glorifies selfish wealth and consumerism.
Rowan is equally compelling, being a single dad as the result of a brief fling. I appreciate how everything is explored, from his amicable, if somewhat complex relationship with his ex, to his adventures with single parenthood, to his secret sexual dysfunction which complicates any romantic relationship he has.
These two are wonderful together, and I liked how their relationship built gradually in a sweet slow-burn. There are complications that arise because of their respective pasts, but I appreciate how the two of them ultimately navigate them.
This is a sweet, heartfelt read, and I’d recommend it to anyone who enjoys Black romance, especially if it’s set outside the U.S./the West.