Genre: Romance
LGBTQ+ Category: Straight, Includes Trans Story Arc
Reviewer: Lee
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About The Book
Daisy’s Adventures in Love picks up where Love, Lust & WTF left off. Daisy’s finally found her match. Or has she? Is Brad really the one? And is Daisy ready for the surprising new challenges that a larger family might bring her?
Experience Daisy’s adventures, diving into love, family and fun. Daisy’s heart is on fire, for her girls, for Brad and for his kids. But as Daisy’s family potentially grows bigger, new unsettling—even terrifying—challenges arise. Daisy and Brad find themselves on a tightrope- one in which falling may mean the loss of one of their children. When you love more, you have more to lose.
To triumph, Daisy must dive deeper into not only love, but diversity, gender issues, transphobia, sexuality struggles, acceptance and the true meaning of motherhood. Luckily Daisy and Brad are not alone. Supported by a diverse cast of friends, including Kyle a psychologist who specializes in LGBTQ+ youth and family counselling, they chart a new-bigger and less predictable- life together.
Opportunities for growth abound. Kids growing and changing like crazy, love is anything but smooth and simple. Daisy’s gal pal chats bring her back to the crazy world of dating, a time she wants to avoid like the plague.
The Review
The best contemporary romantic comedies capture their audience’s heart through a combination of clever humor, deep feeling, soul, and an element of the real. And so it is with Nikki Sitch’s Daisy’s Adventures in Love. This is Sitch’s second book, and is the sequel to Love, Lust and WTF? Daisy’s Adventures in Dating.
Both books deal heavily with the wacky—at times upsetting and often unpredictable—world of online dating. In this novel, Daisy appears to have found her man in Brad (a genuinely good guy), and the online dating elements all come from her uproarious group of friends who Daisy meets on a regular basis to talk turkeys. Sitch skillfully balances these comedic elements with the deeper core of her story, which is about family, love, and acceptance.
There is a beautiful symmetry to Daisy’s Adventures in Love. While Daisy and Brad come closer together—along with the challenges of integrating their families—Daisy’s friends also follow their own arcs in the world of dating and love. This symmetry is critical, for the family issues that Daisy’s Adventures in Love revolve around are perilous. One of the children has gender dysphoria and is coming to terms with being transgender.
While Nikki’s writing is steeped in love—love and the need to be loved very notably permeates her novels—transgender issues are neither simple nor humorous. Happiness, and possibly lives, are at stake as one of Daisy’s children face the questions of their place and gender in the world. Despite all the love, Sitch doesn’t make it easy—she treats gender dysphoria with proper seriousness and with all the nuance such a situation brings. Villains emerge. Rocks are thrown.
But Daisy has an infinite love, and momma bear is there for her cub. Her lover and partner Brad wants to do the right thing, but he recognizes that he may not know what that might be. Brad realizes that he has much to learn, and feels that he is on a “Tightrope,” one with consequence beyond himself.
“But I could feel the breeze. The air flowing over me, high on that slackline. I couldn’t panic there. I couldn’t lose my cool or pretend what was happening to my daughter was an affront to me. An affront at all. It wasn’t about me—it was about her, and if I reacted wrong and lost my balance, maybe it wouldn’t be me that fell—it would be her dropping so far, end over end, flailing onto the sharp and unsympathetic rocks so far below.”
In less skillful hands this honest and deep look at transgender issues may have felt too dark and stressful for some readers, but here the symmetry of the story creates balance. Daisy’s friends and their own parallel search for love and a place in the world present welcome and humorous interludes to the more serious half of the novel. And bring it they do. All the lovely and not so lovely wierdo’s, catfish and liars of the online dating world spring into life through the stories of Daisy’s’ girlfriends. Pooh is—literally—in the air in some of these dating stories.
But despite the raucousness of it all, this side of the tale eventually finds its own path, and both halves of the story find believable and loving resolution.
At times deadly serious, and at others seriously funny, Daisy’s Adventures in Love is an adventure many will wish to take.
Who should read this? Daisy’s Adventures in Love will appeal to a broad audience. Its bladder-loosening doses of humor through the strange and unexpected dating world, mixed with its deeper lessons about love, family, and inclusion deliver a unique experience for readers who like to laugh and strengthens them to face the deeper challenges of a diverse world.
The Reviewer
Lee has a background in physics and applied science, but has always enjoyed reading fiction. His first serious forays in writing came from dungeon mastering and high school drama club, although for nearly three decades as a geophysicist, he wrote only non-fiction. At the age of 25, Lee spent a prolonged period of time on the edge of death, had the last rights read to him, and enjoyed several near death experiences. Not even all the morphine could make him forget those. Lee enjoys rock climbing, cycling, hiking, swimming and writing. He is an Ironman Triathlete.
