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The heroine of The Worst Guy is a plastic surgeon at a teaching hospital with a practice of reconstructive rather than aesthetic cases. My husband is a plastic surgeon who, for the first twenty years of his career was… at a teaching hospital and whose practice was half reconstructive/half aesthetic cases. I have lived academic plastic surgery. And this book… well, it gets about half of it right. This made me mildly crazy. But, that’s just me. Thus, I will–for this review–forget everything I know about the real world of plastic surgery and teaching medical surgical departments.
So….
Sara Shapiro, at thirty-nine, knows her shit. She’s a plastic surgeon at a busy hospital in Boston. (She, by the way, is the good kind of plastic surgeon–she doesn’t do any cosmetic work, only burns and reconstructive work.) As the book begins she is incensed. One of the ER surgeons, the absurdly hot and famously rude Sebastian Stremmel, has STAPLED a patient’s face. (Staples are used in many cases to close wounds–they’re faster than sutures and tend to have a lower complication rate. No surgeon would ever use them to close a facial wound. Whoops! Forget I mentioned it.)
Sara storms into the ER exam room where Sebastian is doing his charts and, in the confrontation, they manage to destroy the room. This doesn’t go over well with the hospital’s Chief of Surgery who–not going to say a word about the utter absurdity of this–commands Sara and Sebastian to complete eight hours of conflict resolution therapy. Both Sara and Sebastian are horrified by this. Not because they’d have to completely upend their surgical schedules but because they fucking do not want to fucking waste their time in such a useless endeavor with someone they can’t stand to be around.
It will shock absolutely no one that underneath all of Sara’s and Sebastian’s sniping burns a fierce attraction. They’re both perfectionists. Sara’s drive has left her with serious digestive problems and Sebastian uses work to escape emotions. They’re ambitious, attractive, brilliant, and live in the same brownstone. It’s kismet or at least very obvious that they make a damn sensible and sexy pair. And by the evening after their second session with the insightful hospital therapist, Sebastian’s pushed Sara up against the door to her apartment (she’s on the first floor, he’s on the third), and the two have embarked on a very hot affair.
I love Sara and Sebastian–the book is a dual first person narrative–and their distinct voices. Canterbary writes how surgeons talk. The two have a friend group–they all have their own books–made up of surgeons and their spouses and to a person the MDs and their smart and snarky partners are perfectly limned. I could listen to any of them needle each other all day long.
Sara grew up as the only daughter of a morally bankrupt plastic surgeon, one who makes bazillion of dollars making women and men look like Barbie and Ken. He sneers at her academic work and uses his (unbelievable) influence over her chair and others in the field to unsettle her–he wants her to come and join his group of West Coast aesthetic clinics. Sara isn’t tempted. She’s a medical rock star; double boarded in both general surgery (I think. It wasn’t quite clear.) and in plastics–one of less than 2000 such women in the USA–a great teacher, and a compassionate caregiver. She works to silence the good girl pleaser in her and to listen to her savage-hearted bitch. She loves her work and her friends. She sure as hell isn’t interested in getting sucked into a professionally risky and emotionally chaotic relationship with a grump who rarely speaks and whose glare is famous throughout their world.
There’s no way, however once Sebastian treats her to the wonders of his body, she can stay away. And why would she? Sebastian is fabulous. He’s hilarious, inventive, and understands her. He’s single at forty-two and also loves his job and his friends although he’d never admit to the latter. He gives Sarah what she needs in bed and lets her push him away as soon as she’s come even as he knows they could be so much more than just incendiary lovers. He is the BEST.
As much as I liked Sebastian and Sara as individuals, I struggled a bit with them as a couple. They have the hot sex thing down but they don’t communicate well with each other and, over the 300 pages it takes from them to go from fuck buddies to an HEA, I grew impatient with their obdurate animosity. Canterbary does a good job of explaining why her lovers find it so hard to connect but she does it again and again. I was ready for better sooner.
I enjoyed The Worst Guy. The writing is deft, funny, and detailed in wonderful ways. Even though I struggled with her depiction of a surgical department, I found the world Canterbury created vivid–her Boston is Boston and each environment she writes is easy to imagine. This is a very sexy book and we all know how down I am for that. I’ve already begun reading Preservation, Alex’s story–she’s Sara’s best friend. It’s making me smile–I clearly have a thing for brilliant, profane, funny surgeons. The Worst Guy gets a B from me.
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Grade: B
Book Type: Contemporary Romance
Sensuality: Warm
Review Date: 02/03/22
Publication Date: 12/2021
Recent Comments …
Yep
This sounds delightful! I’m grabbing it, thanks
excellent book: interesting, funny dialogs, deep understanding of each character, interesting secondary characters, and also sexy.
I don’t think anyone expects you to post UK prices – it’s just a shame that such a great sale…
I’m sorry about that. We don’t have any way to post British prices as an American based site.
I have several of her books on my TBR and after reading this am moving them up the pile.
Impenitent social media enthusiast. Relational trend spotter. Enjoys both carpe diem and the fish of the day.
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I work in a medical center lab. I’m having a laugh on the idea that a med center’s bosses would prefer employees to get mentally healthy over making money.
I read The Worst Guy at the beginning of the year, having seen it popping up on or around may end of year “Best Of” lists. I enjoyed it – enough to continue on and read the books related to some of the other character pairings. The Worst Guy was the best of the bunch IMO. As Dolly points out below, Canterbary seems to really like poking at that middle ground (between attraction and resolution) with characters who for one reason or another cannot quite get onto the same page. While plot points in The Worst Guy required some suspension of disbelief (anger management counseling for two very busy surgeons? yeah, right), the “competition getting in the way of actual communication” between these two otherwise really smart people worked for me.
I read The Worst Guy pretty recently and I had mixed feelings. I adored Sebastian. I understood where Sara was coming from and empathized with her struggles both personally and professionally but she was just too mean to Sebastian and I couldn’t get over that.
I loved The Worst Guy. Probably my favorite book of 2021. Essentially it’s a Grumpy/Grumpy story, though one of the pair seems sunny on the outside. Was it 100% faithful to the practice of academic medicine? No, of course not. It’s fiction. The dialog was as sparkly as it gets, there were comic scene between Sebastian and Sara that had me grinning and often laughing out loud, the challenges of an eating disorder’s permanent scars were realistic and riveting. I thought it was great reading.
Question, since many of you are yourselves doctors or friends/relations of one: the model on the cover has a beard. Would a RL surgeon have a beard? As an aesthetic choice I’m fine with it (my husband had a beard and I liked it), but does it make it harder to maintain proper sanitary conditions in the OR? Just wondered.
Lots of MDs have beards now–it’s common even among surgeons. But, back in the day, they were banned by many surgical departments. When my husband was in academia, the Chair of the Surgery Department banned them. A young guy came along and said it was his right and the Chair fined him 10K. The young surgeon shaved.
Surgeons always wear masks when operating so it’s not really a sanitary thing for them. That said, I don’t see many MDs with lumberjack beards.
There are still some surgical specialties where “tradition” is still very strong and beards are verboten. But there are more and more men with neatly trimmed goatees that are covered by their masks.
For men with full on beards, there is a hood-type thing that covers their neck in addition to the mask.
The increasing diversity in medicine, at least in the US, UK, and Canada, (and I think AUS as well) has changed the landscape (manscape?) for beards, as Sikhism requires it for men and it is part of the religious observance of many Muslim and Jewish physicians. It has been an issue through the pandemic because many employers have pressured doctors to shave for masking. It is, however, often possible to wear a properly fitted mask over a beard, and there are some alternatives to masks which accommodate beards.
My sense is there’s still quite a gap, at least in much of the US, between what is allowed and what is actually done. I see lots of MDs with close cropped beards, but almost no one in an OR table with a long one.
This is not to say it isn’t changing. One of my son’s best friends is a Sikh and he’s an anesthesiology resident. He says he gets some side eye but it’s not been a problem.
The thing I wondered about was an MD–Sara–who wore tee shirts. Every MD and med professional I’ve ever seen wears scrubs unless it’s a day that they would only see patients in clinic and even there, most wear scrubs.
Agree! She mentioned imposter syndrome and difficulty being taken seriously. A real female plastic surgeon would not wear funny t-shirts around the hospital. She would only wear scrubs.
The best way to express yourself in scrubs is to wear subversive socks!
Dabney – I agree with your review and I appreciate your insight into life as a plastic surgeon.
I’m a doctor and I appreciate many of the things Canterbary got right. I like that the characters are older – late 30s-40s. I’m tired of doctors at the apex of their field in their 20s. That’s just fantasy.
I love the snark and friendships with other doctors. I love Sara and Sebastien individually. But I agree, I just don’t see them as a couple.
And never close a facial laceration with staples! But this reminds me of my ER rotation as a med student: An undergrad fell and cut her scalp. (You can use staples on the scalp since hair will cover the scar.) As I started to close her laceration with staples she started yelling “You can’t staple my head! Staples are for paper. Staples are not for heads!”
I can totally see that! My first C-section was closed with staples and they just looked wrong to me. They also scarred the hell out my stomach. When I had my second, I asked that the original scar be cut out and that the wound be closed by a plastic surgeon! I hated the dents they’d left.
I liked, but did not love, THE WORST GUY—but even when Canterbury’s books aren’t quite top-shelf, her “B” books outshine many other romances. I think one of the things that keeps me coming back to her is the interconnect way her fictional universe works: every book and MC is somehow connected in one way or another to at least one other book—going all the way back to her Walsh Family series. Canterbary excels at presenting people whose professional competence does not protect them from emotional blunders and she’s really good with friendships, food, and pets (THE WORST GUY was something of an anomaly, as neither MC had so much as a pet fish—understandable with their schedules, but a bit unusual for Canterbary nonetheless).
I also read Far Cry which I felt sort of the same thing about. I enjoyed it a lot but I wanted the leads to get their heads out of their asses sooner than they did, especially the heroine. But I think I have less patience than most for angst caused by communication errors.