I am behind on my TBR challenge for this year so I am going to try to write several posts over the next few days to play catch up. This post is actually on the topic for August. And a BIG SPOILER ALERT! should you be planning on reading this book.

Reading Note 92: August 20 – Do the Hustle

Promise me Sunshine by Cara Bastone

The blurb: Lenny’s a bit of a mess at the moment. Her best friend, Lou, recently passed away after a battle with cancer, and her death has left Lenny feeling completely lost. She’s avoiding her concerned parents, the apartment she shared with Lou, and the list of things she’s supposed to do to help her live again. The only thing she can do is temporary babysitting gigs, and luckily, she just landed a great one, helping overworked, single mom Reese and her precocious daughter, Ainsley. It’s not perfect: Ainsley’s uncle, Miles, always seems to be around, and is kind of… a huge jerk. But if Lenny acts like she has it all together, maybe no one will notice she’s falling apart.

Miles sees right through her though. Turns out, he knows a lot about grief and, surprisingly, he offers her a proposition. He’ll help her complete everything on her “live again” list if she’ll help him connect with Ainsley and overcome his complicated relationship with Reese. Lenny doubts anything can fill the Lou has left behind, but she begins to spend more time with Miles, Lenny is surprised to discover that, sometimes, losing everything is only the first step to finding yourself, and love, again.

As the blurb says, the book opens with Lenny racing to a babysitting job looking a mess. Lenny is on an ultimate hustle. Finding itinerant work as she can’t commit to anything as she is trying to deal with the loss of her best friend. At the babysitting job for young Ainslie, Ainslie’s concerned uncle, Miles enters and hovers, keeping a close eye on this stranger his sister is allowing into her home.

What starts as a gruff mistrust of each other, slowly builds towards understanding, and care and friendship where neither can really take care of themselves as they are so wrapped in their own problems, yet they see one another with clarity as there is a distance (at least at first). Miles somehow identifies that Lenny is struggling and offers her some tangible help.

Lenny has her strengths, especially in understanding children, thus her success as a babysitter. Miles is awkward around his niece yet he hovers out of care, trying to give attention but struggling to connect. Lenny tells him that “kids are actually pretty easy. If you can figure out how to feed and water them in a calm place, they’ll mostly be all right” – and isn’t this something I wish I knew that before I had my children.

This is a love story, I swear. This is what happens when you’ve promised someone you’ll live again.

Neither Lenny nor Miles save each other from their own difficulties. Instead they connect and somehow make space for each other in a way that is deeply personal. Like when Miles tells Lenny that to heal you need to do “something good for you, something bad for you and a change of scenery”and that this “doesn’t actually fix anything but it buys you a little time”. And Lenny needed a lot of time to heal, and you see her applying this very sensible advice, if anything, just to buy time.

The thing that really stood out for me is that had this been a late 20th century (and even early 21st century) romance, Miles would have been gruff and cruel, shaking Lenny out of her misery, an angry corporate 30something. In 2025 though, our hero is soft and mushy. He is understanding with a depth we could only hope for in a partner. Which I think is completely in line with the desires of this current generation of newly minted adults (not the late teens – more the late 20s) but also indicative of the change that has occurred in writing desirable men. Also, Lenny’s chaotic-ness, from sleeping on the ferry, the mess, the thrift shop clothing, the dancing through the night – it felt understandable, a deep awareness of the way current city society can be on the edge.

There were some inconsistencies and annoyances in the book, such as the demonising of an ex, the fact that Miles states that “dancing is not my thing” – why why why! If you can dance, you have rhythm, and rhythm is necessary for sex, dancing is sex on the dance floor and I cannot understand why romance authors keep writing heroes as not being able to dance. Who wants to get in bed with a man who can’t move to a rhythm? If he can’t connect to his own sense of music, then he’s got zero chance of getting the rhythms of a great fuck right. Sheesh! Let these male characters get down and boogie. /this rant will never be over.

This book is a must read, it is an examination of grief, the way loss of a friend can impact our wellbeing, and the possibilities that can emerge from such dark emotions. We often focus on love and intimate relationships but the loss of a deep and enamoured friendship can be just as devastating, and fundamentally change people. In this book, for Lenny, the only way to overcome that loss is to find a new way of living, and perhaps build totally different relationships in a new home, before Lenny could go back to her old self.

The romance in this book is a slow slow burn, which could have been annoying, except for the awareness of this pacing, with Lenny saying “Do some people slowly fall in love and not realise it?”, and you, the reader, realise that this is a story of two people slowly falling in love, and you didn’t realise it. Miles sums this all up by saying “Well, I can’t promise the sunshine. But I can do everything else”. This man literally is the sunshine of this book in his understated, still-waters-run-deep gruff and grumpy demeanor.

With this book Bastone give you insights into grief, healing and slow love that felt deeply personal. What a wonderful, emotional and kind book. I adored it.