Review: "Same Time Next Year" by Tessa Bailey

Same Time Next Year by Tessa Bailey
Published December 2023 via Amazon Original Stories
★★★

Sumner needs a visa, and fast. Britta doesn't need anything, but as long as there are no strings attached—and with a payout to sweeten the deal—she's willing to be Sumner's wife...on paper. For now.

I've only read one of Tessa Bailey's books, and I picked up this novella partly to refresh my memory and see if I should read more of her full-length works. And...well, I'm not saying never again, but this isn't really my cup of tea. 2.5 stars. Let's talk about book length, let's talk about sex, and let's talk about getting an American visa.

Book length: Again, this is a novella. That's great in some respects: it's a quick story, readable in one or two sittings, with a focus on the two characters. But...in other respects this feels like Bailey took an idea for a novel and just left out the side plots and characters to focus on the main characters (and the main characters in bed), and that's not generally the strategy I'd suggest for a novella. Makes me wonder whether a full-length version of this wasn't going where the author had hoped...or whether this is meant as a teaser of sorts for longer books set in the same world.

Sex: When I read It Happened One Summer, I found that the sex was a bit too oh-baby-oh-baby-do-me-harder-oh-baby for my personal reading preferences, and here it's kind of...that on speed. If you like your romance-novel sex explicit, dirty, and full of screaming that should (but inexplicably doesn't) wake the neighbors, this might be one for you. It's still not so much my thing, but I wouldn't be altogether surprised if at some point (in the future or in the past; I haven't gone through her backlist) Bailey opted to eschew the whole 'plot' part of things and write erotica.

Getting an American visa: Don't take your green card advice—or time line—from this book. It is at best wildly optimistic and at worst involved not even so much as a basic Google search of research. This is another place where I might have preferred this to be a full-length novel, as in a longer work it could have made a ton of sense as an extended conflict: naïve hero and heroine thinking they can be married, green-carded, and divorced with nary a whiff of suspicion in a year...only to find out that the process will take much longer than that, and either they'll have to stay married for (potentially) years or Sumner will have to give up his green card dreams. But in the shorter version it just...takes quite a lot of willful ignorance of reality and bypassing of hard questions.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.