Rating: 3 stars out of 5  

Kieran Delaney-Schwartz—adoptee, underachiever, and self-professed slacker IT guy—lives his under-the-radar life by the motto: Don’t try, don’t fail. His adopted siblings are all overachievers thanks to his driven, liberal parents, but Kieran has elected to avoid disappointing anyone by not getting their hopes up. He’s coasting through his early twenties when he’s hit head-on by Theo. The successful decade-older Broadway producer sweeps him off his feet for a whirlwind thirteen months that are pretty sweet until it all comes screeching to a halt on Valentine’s Day, with an unexpected proposal via a NYC Times Square Flash mob.

Now everyone wants in on the wedding, except the grooms…

K.A. Mitchell’s Collision Course remain’s a dog-eared favorite read of mine.  And with each new story, I hope to find the same magic and character dynamics that made that novel such a comfort read for me.  Unfortunately, Put A Ring On It is not that story…at least for me.

Several elements kept it from that status and it starts right at the beginning with a flashback. Thirteen years ago, a group of men, all close friends, head to Coney Island for a post-graduation get together.  It turns into a promise to continue to meet there, no matter where they are and what they are doing. Only one of them is our main character, the rest of his friends will each have a book in the series.  But in starting here with so many voices (and continuing with them with their multiple points of views and plots throughout the story), our focus on the main characters and their troubled relationship is diluted before any connection is made.

Another element that threw the book off for me? Kieran and Theo is a couple that lacked charisma on many levels.  I don’t mind relationships with a age span between the individuals, especially if the author makes a good argument for it or makes the difference in years seem inconsequential.  Not here.  Kieran seems immature.  He doesn’t want to make a commitment (which is fine) But he goes along and does.  He won’t meet Theo’s friends or go to functions important to Theo.  He reads young, self involved and immature.  Which, again ok, but not a fit for Theo.  Theo reads too old for Kieran.  He loves his job, producing musicals, he’s a over the top extrovert who doesn’t stop to think what his younger lover might want. Or that his younger lover might not want the things he does. Again not a good fit and Mitchell never makes the reader feel as though  these two have any common ground for their feelings for each other.  Its one awkward clash after the other with the  reader caught in the middle and not happily as might be the case in another story.

Put A Ring On It definitely has a ring at the center, one that comes out at a proposal gone hideously wrong and then continues to pop up all through the story, mostly as a promise to “think about getting married”, a serious dilution of the commitment the ring represents.  The ring turns things around but that aspect feels unrealistic by the time it  finally happens because of all the events that came before.

This story is well written, the characters believable and yet for me it doesn’t hold together as a romance or wholly cohesive narrative.  Too many points of view, too many foundation plot threads laid down that obscured the main one here, and in the end two main characters that lacked the essential “magic” needed to make them feel like they would make it past the one year marker.

Cover art by Reese Dante is spot on and totally adorable.

Sales Links: Dreamspinner Press | All Romance (ARe) | Amazon | Buy It Here  (preorder until Sept 9)

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