Anything You Can Do by R.S. Grey on February 2nd 2017
Pages: 210
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Lucas Thatcher has always been my enemy.
It’s been a decade since I’ve seen him, but our years on opposite coasts were less of a lasting peace and more of a temporary cease-fire. Now that we’re both back in our small town, I know Lucas expects the same old war, but I’ve changed since high school—and from the looks of it, so has he.
The arrogant boy who was my teenage rival is now a chiseled doctor armed with intimidating good looks. He is Lucas Thatcher 2.0, the new and improved version I’ll be competing with in the workplace instead of the schoolyard.
I’m not worried; I’m a doctor now too, board-certified and sexy in a white coat. It almost feels like winning will be too easy—until Lucas unveils a tactic neither of us has ever used before: sexual warfare.
The day he pushes me up against the wall and presses his lips to mine, I can’t help but wonder if he’s filling me with passion or poison. Every fleeting touch is perfect torture. With every stolen kiss, my walls crumble a little more. After all this time, Lucas knows exactly how to strip me of my defenses, but I’m in no hurry to surrender.
Knowing thy enemy has never felt so good.
The (in)famous enemies-to-lovers trope, when done perfectly, will probably make me sing like a canary. I jumped on R.S Grey’s “Anything you can do” hoping to do just that, but came away rather mixed as childhood rivalry turned into childish pranks, petty insults and a boatload of push-pull before someone finally caved in.
Maybe it’s the first person narrative showing up here, but it’s a combination of that and the tone that left me quite confounded with the characterisation. It was hard to like Daisy who’s as imperious and juvenile a doctor I’d ever seen. Written wholly in her POV, there were parts I found funny, such as her denial and subsequent acceptance of how her rival-like relationship with Lucas had changed the moment they started working together. Yet just as I was warming up to her, I found myself grimacing at the pranks that she played which just didn’t fit my idea of doctors who had actually taken the hippocratic oath, gone through residency and should, by and large, have matured beyond high school.
In fact, there were times when I felt that Daisy’s voice—snarky and snide—seemed inappropriate, veering closer to the hysterical bit of rom-com as the characters magically turn back the clock by acting as hormonal, decade-younger-version of themselves, with a huge amount of teenage snobbery, pride and angst thrown in. R.S Grey does capture Daisy’s crazed frame of mind quite well on the other hand, though I was tempted to call her a mad cow (the character, not the author) at the halfway mark. Yet not having Lucas’s balancing POV made it harder to get a grasp on both lead characters; I couldn’t quite understand how he loved her all his life, but didn’t exactly do much to prove it or to dismiss the sense of competition that grew between them culminating in the decade-long separation.
Overall, “Anything you can do” was a mixed bag for me. Some bits were funny, appropriate for the rom-com vibe that Grey tried to keep consistent here, but even that quickly moved to a version of crazy left me more bewildered than fully satisfied.
