Courtroom Drama by Neely Tubati Alexander

Sydney Parks thinks she might be the first person in the world to look forward to serving jury duty. When Margot Kitsch, an OG cast member of the hit reality show Authentic Moms of Malibu is arrested after the untimely death of her cast member husband, Joe, Sydney knows being selected for the jury is the most interesting thing that ever happened to her.

However, it doesn't take long for Sydney to realize that being part of a sequestered jury in a high-profile case is not at all what legal dramas had led her to expect—especially when she learns that her childhood best friend, Damon, whom she hasn't seen in ten years, is also a jury member.

As the trial wears on, Sydney realizes there's a lot more to the case than she first thought. And there's also a lot more to Damon—she soon finds herself falling under his spell despite the court's instructions not to fraternize. His tendency to break the rules and find adventure is hard to resist in their otherwise dull juror's world. But getting close to Damon also means having to face the complicated reasons their friendship abruptly ended just when they were on the precipice of something more.

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With all the drama in and out of the courtroom, how is Sydney supposed to ignore the fraught history between them? How is she supposed to avoid him when he's sitting next to her in the jury box every day with his broad shoulders and intoxicating smell? And how is she supposed to ensure Margot gets a fair trial if her unfinished business with Damon causes the mistrial of the century?

Why I Picked It Up

I love to read a romance on a plane. Lately, I've been absolutely ripping through books on my long-haul flights, and it's a nice buzzy entertainment.

I loved my first experience with Neely's books, In a Not So Perfect World, and thought it was highly underrated in that I don't see nearly enough people mention it. It's commercial in the sense that you've read plenty of similar structures and stories before, but the vivid voice gives you plenty to love.

Now, this one was basically The Villain Edit meets Jury Duty (TV), which was a fascinating combination to me. If I hadn't immersed myself in a creative career fresh out of the gate, I likely would have gone to law school, so I do miss the rush of being involved in hearings and all the associated sensations—adrenaline, exhaustion, the weight of responsibility, and even a tinge of guilt for occasionally viewing the process as deeply interesting even as it has significant stakes for others.

About the Book

This book did a lot well and a lot just okay. Overall, it's a net-positive and a good beach read that was worth the library check-out. I have a lot of "book club"-type thoughts in grappling with specific details about the narrative, because I was very picky at how aspects of the plot unfolded. So it was highly entertaining, but also frustrating in certain pockets.

So this is also going to be a more book-club-style discussion than an overt review, but I'll do my best to avoid anything that could be misconstrued as being spoiler-esque.

Parasocial Relationships & Reality TV

First, admittedly—this probably hits a lot harder for people who like reality TV. Reality TV is one of those arenas in which I really don't want to seem judgmental, but I just can't fathom some of the epiphanies held by the main character i.e. she had some very obvious moments in being like "Wow, how someone presents themselves on camera is more of a front than you expect. She surely doesn't show all her genuine emotion to viewers!"

I think there's a scale to the belief we have in parasocial relationships as it's how so much of the modern era is built on personal branding that's shockingly insidious—but a realization of this caliber should not have been treated as such a significant turning point. Like, I couldn't entirely follow the arc of seeing the main character's relationship to Monique (?) change, because some of the conclusions around the impact of the show felt so obvious. Of course, Monica has a whole other life or backstory that never makes it to the screen. Is that not the nature of a public figure?

So that's the first pillar of the book: the main character deeply relies on this reality TV show. It starts out as a pursuit that fills a void of sorts. In that sense, I have to give Neely Tubati Alexander props for aptly characterizing someone like this, because it's probably pretty true-to-form to how people become superfans of anything. She's always creative with protagonist interests (as in her first book, the main girl is a doomsday prepper because of past family trauma) which I appreciate. Overall, it was a noble attempt at that kind of character sketch that just occasionally had its too-obvious realizations that felt mismatched.

A rule I have that also came up just now: if I forget the main character's name, they're not particularly memorable, and I had to look up what Sydney's name was. So I'm not sure she had much beyond this void defining her. I found her reliance on the show interesting, but there apparently wasn't enough beyond that to prop her up for me.

A big part of this discussion (Sydney using the TV show as an emotional crutch of sorts) also does impact the trial and how she views it in an incredibly biased way that just was wild to consider on a legislative front. It's a little horrifying, really, and maybe I have too rosy an idea of how people consider themselves reasonable or not.

On the nonfiction side, I read a lot about unconscious influences, rationality and relativism, polarized opinions, and the like, so I'm constantly interrogating how our media ecosystems and exposure shift our perceptions of our own capacity for objective judgment.

The Stakes of the "Forbidden" Romance

The tonal mismatch leads me to the second significant issue I couldn't really look past in the book: the mismatch in the stakes.

The rom-com element of the book is that the main character encounters an ex who is on jury duty with her, and they're not supposed to taint or corrupt the jury pool in any way by having personal relationships (although they're sequestered together for a long time.) They already get around this during jury selection by basically insinuating that they knew each other briefly so long ago but didn't currently have strong ties. But clearly, there is some baggage that they didn't allude to, to the extent that Sydney takes small actions that happen in the trial very personally.

To be clear, the consequence of screwing up the jury in this way is getting a mistrial, and potentially facing jail time. The main characters really only discussed this consequence when convenient for them. The tension in sneaking around was so high in a way that was supposed to be sexy, but really just made me anxious.

It felt mismatched because Sydney cared so much about the outcome of this trial that she felt incredibly strongly about going to bat for this parasocial reality show character that she then had blatantly obvious realizations about—but not enough to keep herself from hanging out with this guy? Y'all can leave it alone for like two weeks, but maybe I'm just speaking as someone who has reasonably decent self-control.

Spoiler here: when they do get caught, nothing really happens, and they skip all the messy bits. It's a fade to black of them discussing what would happen next. And then Sydney has the audacity to feel betrayed by the verdict later? Just all in all: a weird progression of events.

The book I'll compare to is a strange one because it's an opposite genre, but I had a similar experience reading this one as I did when reading The Villa by Rachel Hawkins, who's another author I deeply enjoy: the ending and the stakes do not really match all the work that went into building up the stakes of the narrative, and the dissonance threw me off.

If you have me believe someone cares this much about the moral imperative of this trial (or what-have-you) or the purpose the show serves to others for personal and emotional reasons, you also can't completely throw that away in service to the plot without me feeling that the premise somehow gave way.

Overall Thoughts

Overall though, I actually did appreciate the banal parts of the plot that illuminated some of the magic that people felt from the Jury Duty TV show. The romance was moderately fine. The tone felt corporate and mundane in an almost appealing way—like viewers of The Office. You lean into the excitement of the random hotel lobby having the cereal you like at continental breakfast.

Although I had plenty I did not like about the book, I liked the book overall, and would read anything Neely Tubati Alexander writes next. Just—in execution—this is not the best of her works because there's a lot of plot armor that excuses a lot from the main character in a way that made me think Sydney should have been a lot more mature throughout.

For fans of:

Jury Duty (TV); The Villain Edit by Laurie Devore; Famous in Love by Rebecca Serle; The Villa by Rachel Hawkins; etc.