“I think I love writing messy people.”
Ashley Herring Blake likes writing characters who are in a time of transition. Whether it’s the main character from her successful Delilah Green Doesn’t Care or her latest — Get Over It, April Evans — Blake’s characters don’t shy away from showing up as their full selves, even if they’re not always putting their best foot forward.
Get Over It, April Evans is the second in Blake’s Clover Lake romance series. It focuses on April, who plays a supporting role in Blake’s previous book Dream On, Ramona Riley. In the first book, April is running Clover Lake’s most successful (and only) tattoo shop.
When I was reading Ramona’s book, I had a feeling April would be next to step into the spotlight. For a character who wasn’t the main focus of the story, she really jumped off the page.
“I did know April would get her own book,” Blake tells me over Zoom. “Her actual backstory and her journey and what her book would be was an adventure for me to figure out.”
The character of April Evans has evolved from her initial inception during the writing of Ramona Riley. In fact, the advanced copies of Ramona featured some different backstory for April, which Blake changed very late in the process. Her story was originally conceived as a “reverse fated mates” with a complicated love square.
“I felt because there were four of them, I had to convince the reader that they’re connected to the people they’re not gonna end up with,” she explains. “They genuinely think they’re crazy about them and then disconnect them and then connect to the actual true people. It was too much.”
Blake got about 30,000 words into this version of the story before realizing it “didn’t feel like I was getting deep enough into each character.” So she scrapped it at the last possible minute. However, April has remained the same “at her core.”
April Evans is a person who is rooted in one place but feels like she’s constantly in transition at the same time, which I understood as a very Millennial quality. She has a business she enjoys and has created a community around her, but at the same time, her ties to the town where she grew up feel nebulous at best.
When the book starts, her best friend has left her to live her dreams in LA; her tattoo shop has closed; and she’s on her way to spend the summer teaching art at Cloverwild, a new lakefront resort, to make ends meet. Her life is in major upheaval, and she’s shouldering most of it alone.
“She is kind of at that crossroads,” Blake says of April in the beginning fo the book. “She does love Clover Lake, but she is figuring out her life and figuring out what is next.”
Blake explains that April “is kind of at that point where she’s like, why am I even doing the things I’m doing and why did I make the decisions that I made?” She’s 33, so it makes sense that she’s asking herself big life questions.
“Do I even like tattoos? Why is my hair dyed? Did I do it to piss off my parents or do I actually really like it?” are all things April contemplates as her book begins.
Life seems to have a way of kicking April while she’s down, and when she arrives, she finds out her roommate and co-teacher is Daphne, the woman her ex-fiancee left her for. The kicker? Daphne has no idea who April is.
According to Blake, Daphne was always a part of April’s story. Daphne is in her late twenties and has spent the last three years dating Elena, who is a big deal in the Boston art scene. In fact, they met while Daphne was interning at the museum where Elena worked. She was young and bright eyed and had no trouble falling for the enigmatic Elena. Then, Elena broke her heart into a thousand pieces. Now she’s barely holding it together after spending a month on her best friend’s couch.
Daphne arrives at Cloverwild a total mess, and she can’t figure out why this complete stranger hates her. During a nighttime boat ride, April drops the hammer about their shared connection.
To me, there’s something inherently queer about this “my ex’s ex” trope, regardless of the gender identity of the characters involved. It lends itself so perfectly to a sapphic romance, and Blake handles it incredibly well.
“I haven’t really written a main character yet who got just absolutely annihilated by the only person they’ve ever been in love with,” Blake says of the choice to use this trope. She had a lot of what-ifs to explore by using this plot, and that was what made it more intriguing to her.
“It made it so much more fun for her [Daphne] to be completely clueless and April to be literally sending her murder dagger eyes,” she says.
Blake and I agree that enemies-to-lovers, or in this case, one-sided enemies-to-lovers is one of our favorite tropes because of the tension. Even as April begins to accept that Daphne was not a willing participant in the ending of her relationship with Elena, there’s still so much friction between them.
“I think you have to break more walls down when it’s an enemy,” Blake says. And April’s walls are not only high but thick and sharp. But over time, she is able to get through what happened to her and begin to put it in the past.
After talking about it, I figured out that Blake and I love the trope so much because we’re both Aries suns, and that feistiness just lives in us.
Astrology is a big part of April’s personality due to Blake herself being an astrology queer. I love that it’s one of her traits, but she doesn’t let the stars rule how she goes through life. She does, of course, use it as a way to read people.
Get Over It, April Evans has all the signature elements of an Ashley Herring Blake novel. There are some deliciously spicy sex scenes, including an early masturbation scene that feels like a perfect appetizer for what’s coming. And while most of the book takes place at Cloverwild, we still get to spend time in Clover Lake, which is definitely my favorite of Blake’s imaginary small towns.
Blake tells me her next book — Take a Chance, Sasha Sinclair, slated for September — doesn’t really take place in Clover Lake, which is a break from format, but they do go back and spend some of their time there.
“You get to spend three books with these people and you get to come back to the people that you already left behind,” she says of writing a series. “And I just loved creating a whole world that went beyond one book. It’s fun to stick with that universe for so long.”
Blake says she’s taking a break from writing series after the release of Sasha Sinclair in the fall of this year.
I’m very glad we get one more book of the Clover Lake crew before they pack things up. And I’m such an Ashley Herring Blake fan girl that I will read anything she writes. But right now, April Evans currently has my heart.
Comments
I’m about half through reading this one right now and I’m thoroughly enjoying it! Ashley Herring Blake has been an auto-buy author for since Delilah Green Doesn’t Care.
same!! it was very hard not to fully fangirl while we talked
I’ve listened to all her audiobooks and love them
Great and amazing!
I enjoyed it a lot, and like Sa’iyada, I’ll read anything Ashley HB writes. I felt an unusual sadness in this one is that April is quite justified in feeling that Ramona **has** been a bad friend since she got together with her squeeze. It’s realistic, sure, and they partially repair by the end, but more by April sucking it up (the Elena thing isn’t the only thing she has to “get over”!) and finding someone herself. Tbh, Ramona’s lack of introspection over it damaged my love for her character that had been built up in the previous book
I don’t have a huge circle of queer friends, but reading the bright falls (Delilah green, Iris Kelly, Astrid Parker) books made me feel really connected to a group of queer people that I could see different parts of myself in each of them❤️ going to re-read soon!
I loved the Bright Falls series! Ramona Riley didn’t hit for me just cause I never like the movie star/famous person trope in romance, but I’ll try leapfrogging that one to this!