"She was going to seduce him on the Fourth of July"
Strings Attached, the theory of the universe, and the deal with Paul's punishment
Happy Monday! I hope your Fourth of July was as exciting as Paul and Emily’s was in Strings Attached. With the book getting a flurry of attention today as ARC reviews are coming in hot, let’s rewind and discuss.
When I reshuffled the series order prior to publishing, I made Strings Attached Book 1 in the Degrees of Desire series. Who could resist a physicist pretending to be a lobsterman having a summer fling with an economist pretending to be a barista? And then meeting on campus in the fall as their real selves…
One of the fun things about this story is the small-town cozy meddling that happens early on. The series is primarily set in Boston, which is a great setting for any academic romance, but I loved creating the fictionalized version of Southwest Harbor, Maine you see in Strings Attached. The market clerk knows Paul has the hots for Emily because the clerk went to school with him. Emily’s boss at the coffee shop has, shall we say, a past with Paul. Everyone knows the house where Emily is staying. Small towns are the best. Especially when you and your summer man decide to get a little frisky at the town fireworks.
As the title of this post suggests, there’s more than one kind of fireworks happening that evening. I was sort of intimidated going into this book’s spicy scenes because the OG Book 1, Baby, Unexpected (now Book 4), has some pretty steamy encounters going on. I set the bar high for spice. On the whole, I’m happy with the way the spice turned out in Strings Attached. I think Paul and Emily are happy, too.
“You know, I’ve suspected for years that men were only using me for my interest in vector autoregressions,” she said. “You perverts are all alike.”
Spice aside, a lot of chatter has been taking place on Goodreads about all the science and math conversations in this book! I laughed because yes, maybe it is a lot. It was definitely a lot of research. I’m a romance author. Science and math are hardly my middle names, so I had to do a lot of fact-checking. An Easter egg in the book is that Paul, who studies cosmology (the study of the universe), is an extremely sharp dresser. My brother is an actual, real-life physicist and swears this is true! Apparently, all the other branches of physics look upon the cosmologists with envy and try to keep pace with their fashions.
In the book, without giving too much away, Paul and Emily both have their own valid reasons for the deception. In trying to get away from the stress of her impending divorce and career worries, Emily randomly blurts out that she’s a barista. Paul is trying to atone for a family situation. The idea for that atonement came from an ancient Greek play.
I was a Classical Languages major in undergrad and ended up reading a lot of New Comedy, which is basically the ancestor of modern romance plots. Tropes like grumpy/sunshine, “convince her father,” and many more all came to us by way of ancient Greek New Comedy. And people call romance fluff!
Paul’s storyline was pulled from a play called Heauton Timorumenos (say it five times fast), which was translated into Latin by the Roman playwright Terence. The original was written by the Greek playwright Menander and only survives in fragments. Fun fact, y’all - this is the lost play that Maria from Future Perfect (Book 5, out July 13) rediscovers to make a name for herself in academia. The title translates to “The Self Tormentor.”
You can read about the play more in depth on Wikipedia if you’re interested, but the super complicated plot involves a guy punishing himself for his role in a family drama by doing manual labor. Kind of like a physicist who spends the summer working in his family’s lobster business instead of in his cosmology lab. And they said I would never use my Classics degree.
Have you read Strings Attached yet? Drop a comment below before you dive into the rest of the series. The entire Degrees of Desire series is available exclusively on Amazon and is free to read on Kindle Unlimited.
