#48 [2022/CBR14] Luck of the Draw by Kate Clayborn

I've tried Kate Clayborn before when I read Love at First at a friend's recommendation. It was all right, but I didn't love it. So I recently decided to give Clayborn another try with Luck of the Draw (2018). I was excited because the protagonist is a lawyer who won the lottery! I was a lawyer, and I would love to win the lottery, so I figured I'd be able to relate. There were some fun parts to this book, I guess, but I also didn't love this one. 

Zoe Ferris used to be a cutthroat corporate attorney. But she and two of her best friends recently won the lottery, which allowed her to quit her job. Right now she's in a bit of a limbo while she figures out what she wants to do with her life. Zoe seems to regret many of her past decisions. She decides that she needs to make amends to the people she's wronged, and she wants to start with the O'Leary family. Zoe's law firm represented the drug company in the wrongful death case of Aiden O'Leary's brother.

When she shows up at the O'Leary household to apologize, Zoe finds that the parents have moved to Florida and Aiden wants nothing to do with her. But then she almost faints, and Aiden is a medic, so he has to make sure she's okay. [Pet peeve: Aiden has his "medical bag" at the house, which doesn't make much sense. Medics often have their own stethoscope, but almost all the medical gear stays on the ambulance where it's needed. Also, I spend too much time with medics to think of them as a good romance novel love interest.]

Somehow this turns into Zoe agreeing to pretend to be Aiden's fiancée because he thinks it will help him win a bid on a campground he went to as a kid. Aiden wants to buy the campground with the legal settlement and set up a drug rehabilitation center in honor of his deceased brother. The two of them go up to the campground every weekend with two other couples who are also vying for the property. At the end, the couples will deliver their proposals in front of everyone and the owners will then decide what happens with the property.

These forced excursions to the camp create a lot of quality time for Zoe and Aiden, even though it is a somewhat odd way to sell a property. Zoe and Aiden did have some good chemistry, though, and I wanted to see them together.

However, I also had a number of problems with this book. First, there were a lot of typos in the Kindle version, which I found very distracting.

Second, most everything that shapes these characters happens before we start the book, but then it's not explained very well. This made me feel more disconnected from the characters. It's not clear why Zoe became the scapegoat in the death of Aiden's brother. I realize she was opposing counsel and gave them a check. But there were a lot more people directly responsible for his death. Although I understand why the O'Leary family wouldn't want to hang out with her, I don't see that she did anything she should feel particularly sorry for. The book wasn't very explicit on this part. In addition, it wasn't very clear how the drugs killed Aiden's brother. Did he simply overdose on opiates? Was he taking something to help him get off drugs and it killed him? It wasn't very clear, and if it had been, it would better justify how much blame the drug company--and Zoe--should get for his death. I felt like Clayborn was deliberately avoiding these issues because she didn't want Zoe or Aiden's brother to be unlikeable, but instead I was left feeling that the situation wasn't real.

Finally, drug addiction is a serious, ugly problem and many people who deal with addiction also struggle with significant traumas and mental health issues. This topic felt a little heavy for a romance novel but also not adequately addressed. Because Aiden's brother dies before the book starts, we only get a glimpse of how his addiction ravaged his family. And since we never met him, his life was just a sad story of a stranger. Also, however noble it might be, I could never imagine the camp owners wanting to turn their happy summer camp full of promising youth into a place full of recovering drug addicts. And after all the descriptions of its beauty and the many months that Aiden spent there growing up, it would have been kind of disappointing to see it change. But then we spent the whole book with Aiden trying to get something that both he and the reader didn't actually want to see happen. I think romance novels can definitely address hard topics like assault and drug addiction, but I felt like this book didn't quite get the balance right. Perhaps this is because of my job where we see problems with drug addiction constantly, but it didn't feel quite right. I think Clayborn is just not the author for me.