I loved Virgin River, and have kept up with the series, and even read the earlier series that linked in, the Valley one (can't remember). I generally like Carr's characters and writing, although one of the VR series left me cold and so far is a DNF. (I do still have a bookmark in it.)
This book is closer to women's lit than romance - 4 childhood girlfriends, now adults, and their lives and loves. Each one has a different challenge to face - two are single, two married. Julie is married to her childhood sweetheart, but is overwhelmed by their difficulty making his two paychecks stretch to cover their family of five, even frugally. Beth is a single doctor, facing a reappearance of cancer - during the first cancer, her fiance left her. Cassie makes all the wrong choices in men - during her moratorium on dating, she hangs out with the completely wrong kind of guy, or so she thinks. Marty's husband Joe doesn't listen to her, and she thinks her marriage might be over.
I enjoyed reading it, finished it in 2 sittings, but somehow the voice of the book bothered me. She gave almost every character in the book a POV at some point, but every voice was the same. They all sounded the same to me. Well, in my head - it wasn't an audio book. Maybe it's the constant switch from POV to POV, but it just seemed overdone. While each character seems different on the outside, all their thoughts seemed the same - the same voice, the same... I dunno, it just wasn't very riveting or interesting. I enjoyed it but it didn't leave a lasting impression - I just got to the last page and was done. The End.
In fact, I had a hard time figuring out how the 4 friends stayed close with lives so different and needs so different. Julie has to couch dive for pennies to feed the kids - how in the world does she even find time to get together with the others? And Beth, an OB/GYN - Cassie an ER nurse - how can they make their schedules mesh? I dunno. I did find myself understanding Cassie and Marty a little more than Beth (I kept thinking of her as Beth from Little Women...) or Julie. I don't need to feel like I can walk in the shoes of the heroine to enjoy the book - I've enjoyed plenty of books where the heroine was nothing like me at all. But I guess I do need to understand her, care about her.
So, Julie and Billy end up in crisis from their lack of money and another unexpected pregnancy inspite of birth control; Cassie spends a lot of time with the Not My Type guy, but in her head she's pretty much putting him down; Marty fantasizes what her life would be like with an old boyfriend; Beth faces chemotherapy. Yeah - pretty different challenges.
Well that is my take. Women's fiction, ok read, 3 stars. The End.
Showing posts with label women's fiction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label women's fiction. Show all posts
Saturday, July 3, 2010
Sunday, May 10, 2009
Blue-Eyed Devil by Lisa Kleypas ****
Yes, it's raining pigs and ice cream floats are free in Hell. I liked another Lisa Kleypas! I'm guessing it's her contemporary semi-women's fiction-slash-romance style that I prefer VASTLY to her mediocre Regency historicals which needed major editing and a dash of interest.
This is the second in the Hardy Cates series, and once again it's told in first person entirely from the heroine's POV. Haven Travis is the youngest child and only daughter of Churchill Travis from book 1, Sugar Daddy. She had a rich, privileged upbringing in Houston's swanky River Oaks community (which is seriously posh and exclusive) but always felt a little ashamed of the conspicuous consumption and the over-use of privilege to get ahead. She considered herself something of a rebel and a feminist, and while she was away at college in the northeast, met a fellow Texan, Nick, who became her first husband.
Her father warned her that Nick was no good, and threatened to cut her off if she married him - just the right button to push to send her into Nick's arms. There was one encounter with Hardy Cates - Haven thought it was Nick when she first started kissing him in a dark corner of a party.
Good as his word, her father did cut her off, and Nick and Haven moved to Dallas where they tried to support themselves. Quickly Nick began showing his true colors - he was manipulative and soon became abusive, first emotionally and then physically. Within 2 years, he had beat her up more than once. When he kicked her out on a cold night, barefoot, no purse or money or ID, she walked to a pay phone and placed a collect call to her oldest brother, Gage, who sent someone to pick her up and get her to Houston.
Once in Houston, she wanted to make her own way without (too much) help. Several times I wanted to wring her neck and tell her to just let them help her a little, but I have to admit she stayed true to character. She refused an offer to be the manager of the downtown building Gage (or the family?) owned, accepting the manager's assistant position instead. The manager was brought over from another property and ended up being as manipulative and abusive in her own way as Nick had been. And Haven, true to form, just took it, didn't tattle, didn't ask for help.
When Hardy finds out Haven has divorced her husband and is living in the building, he leases an apartment there and takes up where they left off - the kiss at the party a little over 2 years before. Everyone in Haven's life, even her best friend, the bisexual playmate from her childhood (male... what was his name?), warns Haven to watch out for Hardy. Hardy had betrayed Liberty in the first book by using some information she innocently revealed to him against the Travis family, so there is an element of a family feud between the Travis men and Cates, although they all respect him.
The descriptions of Haven's slow slide into trusting Nick and then his use of emotional manipulation to control her into thinking his behavior is normal are chilling and no doubt true to life. For women who swear they would never stay with an abuser, listening to his reasoning, his begging forgiveness and promising never to hurt her again might make them rethink their holier-than-thou position. Abused women don't ask for their situation, and they don't stay because they want the abuse to continue. Haven had to rebuild her life and learn to trust again, and this is where Hardy Cates shines as a true romance novel hero.
I'm sticking by the women's fiction genre again - with a dash of romance - because once again the heroine has 2 men, and although you soon realize Hardy will play a bigger part later, once again he's separated from the heroine for a big part of the book. It's more about Haven, about her life and how she reacted to her upbringing and how she survived Nick's abuse. 4 stars.
Oh, I meant to add: I listened to it on audio. This is a different narrator from the first book. This narrator has a different approach, one that was very, very dramatic - almost too much. Her Texan/southern accent is quite a lot thicker and more pronounced than someone who actually grew up in River Oaks would really have - a girl Haven's age would have gone to the best private schools, and would have had a more cultured, rich-girl Texan accent, regardless of her parents' speech. But somehow it still worked for me. It was a dramatic tale, after all. She managed to whimper and sound scared and hurt when appropriate, and to sound contrite when speaking to her husband and her boss and even her father. I liked it, even though I sometimes winced when she went a little over-the-top.
This is the second in the Hardy Cates series, and once again it's told in first person entirely from the heroine's POV. Haven Travis is the youngest child and only daughter of Churchill Travis from book 1, Sugar Daddy. She had a rich, privileged upbringing in Houston's swanky River Oaks community (which is seriously posh and exclusive) but always felt a little ashamed of the conspicuous consumption and the over-use of privilege to get ahead. She considered herself something of a rebel and a feminist, and while she was away at college in the northeast, met a fellow Texan, Nick, who became her first husband.
Her father warned her that Nick was no good, and threatened to cut her off if she married him - just the right button to push to send her into Nick's arms. There was one encounter with Hardy Cates - Haven thought it was Nick when she first started kissing him in a dark corner of a party.
Good as his word, her father did cut her off, and Nick and Haven moved to Dallas where they tried to support themselves. Quickly Nick began showing his true colors - he was manipulative and soon became abusive, first emotionally and then physically. Within 2 years, he had beat her up more than once. When he kicked her out on a cold night, barefoot, no purse or money or ID, she walked to a pay phone and placed a collect call to her oldest brother, Gage, who sent someone to pick her up and get her to Houston.
Once in Houston, she wanted to make her own way without (too much) help. Several times I wanted to wring her neck and tell her to just let them help her a little, but I have to admit she stayed true to character. She refused an offer to be the manager of the downtown building Gage (or the family?) owned, accepting the manager's assistant position instead. The manager was brought over from another property and ended up being as manipulative and abusive in her own way as Nick had been. And Haven, true to form, just took it, didn't tattle, didn't ask for help.
When Hardy finds out Haven has divorced her husband and is living in the building, he leases an apartment there and takes up where they left off - the kiss at the party a little over 2 years before. Everyone in Haven's life, even her best friend, the bisexual playmate from her childhood (male... what was his name?), warns Haven to watch out for Hardy. Hardy had betrayed Liberty in the first book by using some information she innocently revealed to him against the Travis family, so there is an element of a family feud between the Travis men and Cates, although they all respect him.
The descriptions of Haven's slow slide into trusting Nick and then his use of emotional manipulation to control her into thinking his behavior is normal are chilling and no doubt true to life. For women who swear they would never stay with an abuser, listening to his reasoning, his begging forgiveness and promising never to hurt her again might make them rethink their holier-than-thou position. Abused women don't ask for their situation, and they don't stay because they want the abuse to continue. Haven had to rebuild her life and learn to trust again, and this is where Hardy Cates shines as a true romance novel hero.
I'm sticking by the women's fiction genre again - with a dash of romance - because once again the heroine has 2 men, and although you soon realize Hardy will play a bigger part later, once again he's separated from the heroine for a big part of the book. It's more about Haven, about her life and how she reacted to her upbringing and how she survived Nick's abuse. 4 stars.
Oh, I meant to add: I listened to it on audio. This is a different narrator from the first book. This narrator has a different approach, one that was very, very dramatic - almost too much. Her Texan/southern accent is quite a lot thicker and more pronounced than someone who actually grew up in River Oaks would really have - a girl Haven's age would have gone to the best private schools, and would have had a more cultured, rich-girl Texan accent, regardless of her parents' speech. But somehow it still worked for me. It was a dramatic tale, after all. She managed to whimper and sound scared and hurt when appropriate, and to sound contrite when speaking to her husband and her boss and even her father. I liked it, even though I sometimes winced when she went a little over-the-top.
Sunday, May 3, 2009
Sugar Daddy by Lisa Kleypas ****
Well, I guess it's a cold day in hell and pigs are flying - cuz after reading 7 - count 'em, 7 - books by Lisa Kleypas and being pretty darn sure I did NOT like her writing, I have now read one I liked pretty good!
To be honest, it's completely different in every way from the historical romances of hers I read, and I listened to it on audio book, so it's not really that surprising after all.
Sugar Daddy is the first in a series of contemporary women's fiction by Kleypas. The difference between women's fiction and romance is pretty subtle, but there are 2 components of romance - one is the focus on the main protaganists' relationship, and the other is the HEA (happily ever after). What separates this book from the straight romance genre is the relationship - this book is more about the heroine's life and it's not clear until the very end who gets the girl in the end!
In Sugar Daddy, we have a heroine - Liberty Jones - and the story of her life from about age 15 - 25. Told in first person POV, Liberty talks about growing up poor in east Texas, not far from Houston. Her mother is raising her by herself, her father - Mexican American, from whom Liberty got her dark hair and coloring - deceased. They live in trailer parks and scrape by on the meager income her mother makes, with occasional infusions of cash that Liberty never asks about.
Diana Jones has a shiftless, no good live-in boyfriend that she eventually runs off, just before she reveals she's pregnant. After having her second daughter, Liberty's half sister Carrington, Diana apparently goes through some post-partum depression during which Liberty bonds with her sister. When Diana is killed in a car accident, Liberty gets custody and becomes Carrington's legal guardian, raising her.
Hardy Cates is a local boy from another trailer park family. Liberty has a crush on him from the start, even though he's a few years older. He becomes her hero from the first time he manages to save her - and he continues, even after he leaves the little town to make it on his own. He admits right before leaving that he's always wanted her too, but knew if he gave in to his desire for her, he would never leave her and never realize his goals. So she keeps him in her heart as her own true love goal, even as she dates and even sleeps with others.
Liberty meets Churchill Travis at her hair salon job, becoming his personal manicurist and then hairdresser. Although her friends tell her about "sugar daddies", she doesn't have that kind of relationship with him - it's more a father/daughter kind of relationship. She confides in him things she's never told anyone else, including her love for Hardy. He gives her a job as his personal assistant, and insists she and Carrington live with him in his River Oaks mansion.
Because the story takes place in Houston, where I lived for more than half my life, I'm familiar with most of the places she mentions - I always like reading about places I'm familiar with because I can really visualize where things are happening. I guess I should just get over her writing about Katy, Texas, being north of Houston when it's due west and not a bit north!!
When Liberty first meets Churchill's son Gage, Gage is suspicious and not a little angry - assuming that Liberty is a gold-digger, sleeping with his father. But their relationship changes over time, slowly, as they realize they are attracted to each other - which was apparently part of Gage's trouble with her right at the start. Right after they consummate the relationship, though, Hardy Cates comes back into Liberty's life - and she's conflicted. She's still drawn to her childhood hero, even while she's falling in love with Gage.
Herein lies the split from straight romance to womens' fiction. For one thing, Hardy is gone from most of the story. As soon as he leaves the trailer park, he exists only in her mind where she compares him to other men - he doesn't contact her in any way for years. Although other romance novels do have separations, they don't introduce a second candidate for the heroine's heart! For another, in straight romance, there's no question of who the hero of the book is - the one that gets the girl is made clear throughout.
The conflict is now clear - is the love Liberty has held for Hardy strong enough to carry them through, or has she now matured and left that childhood dream behind? But there are other conflicts that arise too - who is Carrington's real father? and... how does Churchill figure into Liberty's and Carrington's lives?
The narrator was pretty good - she managed to develop consistent, distinct voices for each character, even though I didn't particulary like all the voices (her own voice was so young that some of her male character voices just didn't work for me). If I could offer her a critique, I would say she needs to re-think her pauses after commas - she somehow manages to make some of the phrases seem like completely different sentences even though they are related to the previous phrase. An example would be if you used a comma between adjectives, and she paused enough for you to think it was a period instead - a cold, brisk day sounding like A cold. Brisk day. (that's not a direct quote from the book, just an example, by the way!)
All in all, I give it 4 stars - I'm pretty surprised I liked it, although I should not be. After all, I got it and listened to it, even knowing how I feel about Kleypas's writing. I just kept reading about the series and was too curious not to give it a try, since I could get it free from the library!
To be honest, it's completely different in every way from the historical romances of hers I read, and I listened to it on audio book, so it's not really that surprising after all.
Sugar Daddy is the first in a series of contemporary women's fiction by Kleypas. The difference between women's fiction and romance is pretty subtle, but there are 2 components of romance - one is the focus on the main protaganists' relationship, and the other is the HEA (happily ever after). What separates this book from the straight romance genre is the relationship - this book is more about the heroine's life and it's not clear until the very end who gets the girl in the end!
In Sugar Daddy, we have a heroine - Liberty Jones - and the story of her life from about age 15 - 25. Told in first person POV, Liberty talks about growing up poor in east Texas, not far from Houston. Her mother is raising her by herself, her father - Mexican American, from whom Liberty got her dark hair and coloring - deceased. They live in trailer parks and scrape by on the meager income her mother makes, with occasional infusions of cash that Liberty never asks about.
Diana Jones has a shiftless, no good live-in boyfriend that she eventually runs off, just before she reveals she's pregnant. After having her second daughter, Liberty's half sister Carrington, Diana apparently goes through some post-partum depression during which Liberty bonds with her sister. When Diana is killed in a car accident, Liberty gets custody and becomes Carrington's legal guardian, raising her.
Hardy Cates is a local boy from another trailer park family. Liberty has a crush on him from the start, even though he's a few years older. He becomes her hero from the first time he manages to save her - and he continues, even after he leaves the little town to make it on his own. He admits right before leaving that he's always wanted her too, but knew if he gave in to his desire for her, he would never leave her and never realize his goals. So she keeps him in her heart as her own true love goal, even as she dates and even sleeps with others.
Liberty meets Churchill Travis at her hair salon job, becoming his personal manicurist and then hairdresser. Although her friends tell her about "sugar daddies", she doesn't have that kind of relationship with him - it's more a father/daughter kind of relationship. She confides in him things she's never told anyone else, including her love for Hardy. He gives her a job as his personal assistant, and insists she and Carrington live with him in his River Oaks mansion.
Because the story takes place in Houston, where I lived for more than half my life, I'm familiar with most of the places she mentions - I always like reading about places I'm familiar with because I can really visualize where things are happening. I guess I should just get over her writing about Katy, Texas, being north of Houston when it's due west and not a bit north!!
When Liberty first meets Churchill's son Gage, Gage is suspicious and not a little angry - assuming that Liberty is a gold-digger, sleeping with his father. But their relationship changes over time, slowly, as they realize they are attracted to each other - which was apparently part of Gage's trouble with her right at the start. Right after they consummate the relationship, though, Hardy Cates comes back into Liberty's life - and she's conflicted. She's still drawn to her childhood hero, even while she's falling in love with Gage.
Herein lies the split from straight romance to womens' fiction. For one thing, Hardy is gone from most of the story. As soon as he leaves the trailer park, he exists only in her mind where she compares him to other men - he doesn't contact her in any way for years. Although other romance novels do have separations, they don't introduce a second candidate for the heroine's heart! For another, in straight romance, there's no question of who the hero of the book is - the one that gets the girl is made clear throughout.
The conflict is now clear - is the love Liberty has held for Hardy strong enough to carry them through, or has she now matured and left that childhood dream behind? But there are other conflicts that arise too - who is Carrington's real father? and... how does Churchill figure into Liberty's and Carrington's lives?
The narrator was pretty good - she managed to develop consistent, distinct voices for each character, even though I didn't particulary like all the voices (her own voice was so young that some of her male character voices just didn't work for me). If I could offer her a critique, I would say she needs to re-think her pauses after commas - she somehow manages to make some of the phrases seem like completely different sentences even though they are related to the previous phrase. An example would be if you used a comma between adjectives, and she paused enough for you to think it was a period instead - a cold, brisk day sounding like A cold. Brisk day. (that's not a direct quote from the book, just an example, by the way!)
All in all, I give it 4 stars - I'm pretty surprised I liked it, although I should not be. After all, I got it and listened to it, even knowing how I feel about Kleypas's writing. I just kept reading about the series and was too curious not to give it a try, since I could get it free from the library!
Thursday, March 26, 2009
Paradise Valley by Robyn Carr ****
This is installment #7 in the Virgin River series, and as I commented on #6 (Temptation Ridge), it's sorta slowing down for me. I still enjoy it but not as much as the original Virgin River.
This one features several of the couples who haven't yet had their HEAs - the fellow we only knew as a pot grower is in town, post-prison sentence, and is introduced as Dan Brady. He meets the town former drunk now recovering alcoholic Cheryl Creighton. While they don't reach a true HEA, they do get to know each other a little better. I'm sure there'll be more to their saga in one of the 3 upcoming books.
Vanni's father and Shelby's uncle Walt and the movie star Muriel go a little further in their relationship - Muriel gets a chance to do a movie with Jack Nicholson, and leaves town for 6 months, and their relationship is tested.
Cameron and Abby deal with their relationship as the biological parents of her in-utero twins, and Abby also has to deal with her pre-nup issues from the drug-using rock star Kid Crawford. That gets resolved quite nicely and frankly a little bit too sweet for me.
And the biggest shocker of all is Rick getting critically injured in Iraq and coming home to deal with his injuries, and the way he deals with his situation and his friends. It's not good but for anyone squeamish, he comes to a better understanding before all is said and done. I wanted this to affect me more than it did, however. I just wasn't very moved by his story.
Meanwhile, we still have Brie and Mike - Brie gets to show her lawyer chops off in this one; Jack and Mel - Jack's an old busybody! and Mel's doing fine, dealing with her new partner in Cameron; Vanni and Paul - ok, Paul is a sorta dimwit, really, although he means well. For once I thought Vanni called it as it is (calling him a dimwit, which he proved more than once).
It's another chapter in the lives and loves of Virgin River, and their perfect, alpha-but-in-touch-with-their-feminine-sides men and their incredible women and jaysus I wanna live there and have them for my friends! Maybe I can be the new town drunk!
So I'm rating it 4 stars - I did really like it but never felt the emotional surges that other earlier books in the series gave me. I do want her to continue to keep us updated, though! It fits several of my challenges. Cool.
This one features several of the couples who haven't yet had their HEAs - the fellow we only knew as a pot grower is in town, post-prison sentence, and is introduced as Dan Brady. He meets the town former drunk now recovering alcoholic Cheryl Creighton. While they don't reach a true HEA, they do get to know each other a little better. I'm sure there'll be more to their saga in one of the 3 upcoming books.
Vanni's father and Shelby's uncle Walt and the movie star Muriel go a little further in their relationship - Muriel gets a chance to do a movie with Jack Nicholson, and leaves town for 6 months, and their relationship is tested.
Cameron and Abby deal with their relationship as the biological parents of her in-utero twins, and Abby also has to deal with her pre-nup issues from the drug-using rock star Kid Crawford. That gets resolved quite nicely and frankly a little bit too sweet for me.
And the biggest shocker of all is Rick getting critically injured in Iraq and coming home to deal with his injuries, and the way he deals with his situation and his friends. It's not good but for anyone squeamish, he comes to a better understanding before all is said and done. I wanted this to affect me more than it did, however. I just wasn't very moved by his story.
Meanwhile, we still have Brie and Mike - Brie gets to show her lawyer chops off in this one; Jack and Mel - Jack's an old busybody! and Mel's doing fine, dealing with her new partner in Cameron; Vanni and Paul - ok, Paul is a sorta dimwit, really, although he means well. For once I thought Vanni called it as it is (calling him a dimwit, which he proved more than once).
It's another chapter in the lives and loves of Virgin River, and their perfect, alpha-but-in-touch-with-their-feminine-sides men and their incredible women and jaysus I wanna live there and have them for my friends! Maybe I can be the new town drunk!
So I'm rating it 4 stars - I did really like it but never felt the emotional surges that other earlier books in the series gave me. I do want her to continue to keep us updated, though! It fits several of my challenges. Cool.
Sunday, March 22, 2009
Temptation Ridge by Robyn Carr ****
This is #6 in the Virgin River series, and while I really enjoyed reading it, the series as a whole is starting to cool down for me somewhat. I considered the first one, Virgin River, a real keeper. And it's more like women's fiction than romance in that, while there is a definite hero/heroine for each book, the book's focus is wider, on the residents of Virgin River. We continue to run into the previous protagonists of the other books, and there are regular residents who didn't rate a book but still make up the neighborhood.
Shelby is the heroine of this story and she was introduced in an earlier book as Walt's niece - Vanessa's cousin. Walt's only sister was her mother, and Shelby stayed with her mother through 5 years of home care while she wasted away and died from complications of ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease). Now that her mother has been gone for a few months, Shelby sells the house and goes to live with Uncle Walt, Paul, Vanessa, little Matt and Tom while she plans the rest of her young life (she's now 25).
Luke came to town as the owner of a property with cabins on it, property he and his brother Sean bought some years ago as investment property. The old man who had owned it had stayed on as caretaker, but died - and now that Luke is out of the army, he's looking for something to do. He figures he'll fix up the property and sell it for a profit.
Luke has a past with women - when he was 24, he married and was expecting a child with his young beautiful wife when he was shipped off to Mogadishu. When he came back, he was confronted with the awful truth - it wasn't his child, it was the child of one of his officers that was on the mission with him, and she left him for the other man. In the aftermath of that disaster, Luke decided he wasn't the marrying type. So when he gets attracted to Shelby, especially thinking she's about 18, he tries to curb his thoughts. But Shelby had other ideas - and put the moves on him. It takes a long time for her to break him, but eventually he breaks - after giving her The Speech. You know, the one where they both agree it's a short term fling, no weddings or kids, and they'll both move on.
Meanwhile a lot of things go on in Virgin River - Brie has a baby, the town drunk gets sent to rehab, the school bus driver has an accident - yeah, life goes on in Virgin River even when 2 people are struggling with their emotions and their relationship.
I wasn't as "into" Luke and Shelby as I have been for others. The secondary romance in this book is Walt and the movie actress - nothing out of the ordinary there. The Virgin River men are so perfect, so in touch with their feelings, so proud of their women and children, that frankly it's starting to be a little... sterile might be the word I'm looking for. I mean, doesn't Jack ever piss Mel off? Doesn't Paige ever have a cranky moment towards Preacher? Don't any of the h/h every fight at all??
This will go in the Serial Readers Challenge, and maybe in the Spring 2009 challenge too, I'll have to check... 4 stars - still good reading, but nothing earth shattering and smile inducing...
Shelby is the heroine of this story and she was introduced in an earlier book as Walt's niece - Vanessa's cousin. Walt's only sister was her mother, and Shelby stayed with her mother through 5 years of home care while she wasted away and died from complications of ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease). Now that her mother has been gone for a few months, Shelby sells the house and goes to live with Uncle Walt, Paul, Vanessa, little Matt and Tom while she plans the rest of her young life (she's now 25).
Luke came to town as the owner of a property with cabins on it, property he and his brother Sean bought some years ago as investment property. The old man who had owned it had stayed on as caretaker, but died - and now that Luke is out of the army, he's looking for something to do. He figures he'll fix up the property and sell it for a profit.
Luke has a past with women - when he was 24, he married and was expecting a child with his young beautiful wife when he was shipped off to Mogadishu. When he came back, he was confronted with the awful truth - it wasn't his child, it was the child of one of his officers that was on the mission with him, and she left him for the other man. In the aftermath of that disaster, Luke decided he wasn't the marrying type. So when he gets attracted to Shelby, especially thinking she's about 18, he tries to curb his thoughts. But Shelby had other ideas - and put the moves on him. It takes a long time for her to break him, but eventually he breaks - after giving her The Speech. You know, the one where they both agree it's a short term fling, no weddings or kids, and they'll both move on.
Meanwhile a lot of things go on in Virgin River - Brie has a baby, the town drunk gets sent to rehab, the school bus driver has an accident - yeah, life goes on in Virgin River even when 2 people are struggling with their emotions and their relationship.
I wasn't as "into" Luke and Shelby as I have been for others. The secondary romance in this book is Walt and the movie actress - nothing out of the ordinary there. The Virgin River men are so perfect, so in touch with their feelings, so proud of their women and children, that frankly it's starting to be a little... sterile might be the word I'm looking for. I mean, doesn't Jack ever piss Mel off? Doesn't Paige ever have a cranky moment towards Preacher? Don't any of the h/h every fight at all??
This will go in the Serial Readers Challenge, and maybe in the Spring 2009 challenge too, I'll have to check... 4 stars - still good reading, but nothing earth shattering and smile inducing...
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Second Chance Pass by Robyn Carr ****
This is the 5th installment in the Virgin River series, and continues the stories of the residents of the fictional northern California small mountain town of Virgin River. This one is mainly Vanessa and Paul's story.
Paul was in love with Vanessa from the moment he saw her across a crowded room - but his best friend Matt made the move on her first. Matt and Vanessa were married, and Paul had to stand by and watch his best friend and his love in their bliss. Matt went off to Iraq, leaving Vanessa pregnant and living with her dad, the general, and younger brother Tommy, in Virgin River. Matt was killed, and Paul stood by Vanessa, helping her with her grief, even helping deliver Vanni and Matt's son. But he had his own grief - losing his best friend and watching his love suffering, but knowing she would never love him.
Thinking Vanni would never feel the way he did, he left Virgin River and went into the arms of a "friend with benefits" for comfort.But Vanni did feel the way he did - and she constantly called him, asking him to come back and visit. Each figured the other thought of him/her as a brother/sister - and each wanted the other. Dang! The Big Mis! And it's further complicated by Ms Friends-With-Benefits telling him she was pregnant with his child...
A lot of the feedback I've read about this book has people having a lot of opinions - that Vanni didn't mourn Matt enough, that there are too many people to keep track of, that it doesn't live up to the earlier books, that there weren't enough mentions of Preacher. Well, I disagree - Preacher wasn't my favorite character anyway, but he was mentioned a lot.
This is women's fiction with a strong romance component - the story, while there is a focus on the main h/h, isn't JUST about them. It's about the town and its inhabitants, and it's about their families and friends. While building a strong fictional community of people who care about each other and help each other, there's also the undercurrent of truth and reality - pot growers, spousal abuse, dangerous pregnancies, mental illness, death. (Well, actually maybe all of those aren't as prominent in this book as in some earlier ones.) The good guys, the alpha marine heroes, are strong, tall, handsome, built and all have this incredible soft marshmallow heart inside that loves pregnant women and babies and all things domestic. Plus there's lots of male bonding and a touch of talk about feelings between the men. Yeah, there's fiction for you!
But it's done in a way that makes you believe it, makes you long for that small town, those friends, that family that is big, boisterous, loving, perfect. There are suspenseful situations as well, that have you on the edge of your chair, even knowing Carr isn't going to kill off her main characters and that the h/h will get a happy ending!
I didn't like Vanni's character - she was too impatient, too shrill, jumped to conclusions and seemed to walk all over Paul. It took Paul long enough to man up and come forward, and when he did, we're supposed to believe he went from passive to assertive overnight. It wasn't that credible, but I was ok with it - maybe once he said it out loud it was more true for him. I still enjoyed the book all in all.
I'm all about a good narrative, a well-told story, and I don't need any particular format or plotline or anything - just entertain me, make me feel what the characters feel, leave me smiling and happy at the end, and I'm good. 4 stars and a series for the Serial Readers Challenge.
Paul was in love with Vanessa from the moment he saw her across a crowded room - but his best friend Matt made the move on her first. Matt and Vanessa were married, and Paul had to stand by and watch his best friend and his love in their bliss. Matt went off to Iraq, leaving Vanessa pregnant and living with her dad, the general, and younger brother Tommy, in Virgin River. Matt was killed, and Paul stood by Vanessa, helping her with her grief, even helping deliver Vanni and Matt's son. But he had his own grief - losing his best friend and watching his love suffering, but knowing she would never love him.
Thinking Vanni would never feel the way he did, he left Virgin River and went into the arms of a "friend with benefits" for comfort.But Vanni did feel the way he did - and she constantly called him, asking him to come back and visit. Each figured the other thought of him/her as a brother/sister - and each wanted the other. Dang! The Big Mis! And it's further complicated by Ms Friends-With-Benefits telling him she was pregnant with his child...
A lot of the feedback I've read about this book has people having a lot of opinions - that Vanni didn't mourn Matt enough, that there are too many people to keep track of, that it doesn't live up to the earlier books, that there weren't enough mentions of Preacher. Well, I disagree - Preacher wasn't my favorite character anyway, but he was mentioned a lot.
This is women's fiction with a strong romance component - the story, while there is a focus on the main h/h, isn't JUST about them. It's about the town and its inhabitants, and it's about their families and friends. While building a strong fictional community of people who care about each other and help each other, there's also the undercurrent of truth and reality - pot growers, spousal abuse, dangerous pregnancies, mental illness, death. (Well, actually maybe all of those aren't as prominent in this book as in some earlier ones.) The good guys, the alpha marine heroes, are strong, tall, handsome, built and all have this incredible soft marshmallow heart inside that loves pregnant women and babies and all things domestic. Plus there's lots of male bonding and a touch of talk about feelings between the men. Yeah, there's fiction for you!
But it's done in a way that makes you believe it, makes you long for that small town, those friends, that family that is big, boisterous, loving, perfect. There are suspenseful situations as well, that have you on the edge of your chair, even knowing Carr isn't going to kill off her main characters and that the h/h will get a happy ending!
I didn't like Vanni's character - she was too impatient, too shrill, jumped to conclusions and seemed to walk all over Paul. It took Paul long enough to man up and come forward, and when he did, we're supposed to believe he went from passive to assertive overnight. It wasn't that credible, but I was ok with it - maybe once he said it out loud it was more true for him. I still enjoyed the book all in all.
I'm all about a good narrative, a well-told story, and I don't need any particular format or plotline or anything - just entertain me, make me feel what the characters feel, leave me smiling and happy at the end, and I'm good. 4 stars and a series for the Serial Readers Challenge.
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Within Reach by Barbara Delinksy **
This is the 2nd novel in the hardcover "3 complete novels" book. While it wasn't quite as bad as the first on (A Woman Betrayed), it did have the adultery hot button and wasn't much better a story.
The heroine, Danica, is trapped in a loveless marriage. She meets the hero Michael at the beach house she and her husband bought in Kennebunkport, a house she was hoping the 2 of them could get away to and rekindle the marriage. Yeah, well, the clues were all there - her husband was an in-the-closet gay politician using her as cover so he could get a big political appointment. She hated politics, having been raised in a political family where politics came before her. But she married this much older guy hoping to please Daddy. A recipe for imminent disaster, since Daddy will never approve of anything anyway.
Yada yada yada, Michael Buchanan is from a publishing family, whose patriarch hated Danica's father's politics and was vocal about it in his newspapers, just to make it more sinister. She and he fall deeply in love but she manages to keep it platonic until her husband refuses to divorce her. Then they go all the way and conduct a slightly clandestine affair. (roll eyes here)
I guess it was written in the 80s and that must be why it seemed so weird that she couldn't just divorce him? Or maybe it was the Daddy thing. Well, then she's tipped off about his sexuality and holds that up as her trump card.
There's some political and legal intrigue, not much, and then she gets her divorce and she and Michael live HEA.
It wasn't that great. 2 stars.
The heroine, Danica, is trapped in a loveless marriage. She meets the hero Michael at the beach house she and her husband bought in Kennebunkport, a house she was hoping the 2 of them could get away to and rekindle the marriage. Yeah, well, the clues were all there - her husband was an in-the-closet gay politician using her as cover so he could get a big political appointment. She hated politics, having been raised in a political family where politics came before her. But she married this much older guy hoping to please Daddy. A recipe for imminent disaster, since Daddy will never approve of anything anyway.
Yada yada yada, Michael Buchanan is from a publishing family, whose patriarch hated Danica's father's politics and was vocal about it in his newspapers, just to make it more sinister. She and he fall deeply in love but she manages to keep it platonic until her husband refuses to divorce her. Then they go all the way and conduct a slightly clandestine affair. (roll eyes here)
I guess it was written in the 80s and that must be why it seemed so weird that she couldn't just divorce him? Or maybe it was the Daddy thing. Well, then she's tipped off about his sexuality and holds that up as her trump card.
There's some political and legal intrigue, not much, and then she gets her divorce and she and Michael live HEA.
It wasn't that great. 2 stars.
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
A Woman Betrayed by Barbara Delinsky *
ARggghh. I bought this book - 3 novels by Barbara Delinsky in a large hardcover - for a buck at a library sale. I have liked Barbara Delinsky's books, her voice, so who knew how this one would affect me?
Even though there are, if you look at it clinically, a number of HEAs for some of the characters, really, I hated this story. Let's be honest = if you define HEA as a couple considering marrying at the end, then yeah, HEA. But if you try to figure out who the H/H were, no.
I started it last night, figuring with 3 novels in an 800 page book, it couldn't be very long. (It was 300 of the 800.) Then, when the story took so many bad turns, I felt compelled to read it until I finished this morning. I need the HEA. I needed to have these people's issues resolved, to know what happened, and why. Everything that was happening was so awful, I just had to know it all worked out.
And now that I'm done, I feel awful that I read it. It wasn't a romance. I guess it was just fiction, maybe women's fiction. The "heroine" Laura was such a flawed woman. I'm sorry for her very existence, fictional or otherwise, because she made so many wrong choices and was involved in so much hurt. The endings - offers of marriage, foreshadowings of things working out in the future - were so bleak. The resolutions were so unrealistic. Laura needs major therapy, and new friends. Her easy forgiving of her husband and her best friend was just not RIGHT!
First - her perfect accountant husband, always punctual, doesn't show up for dinner. Then he's gone for several days. Her two perfect teenage children, one in college, gather close by for the vigil - then the IRS sends in an agent because, Mr Perfect Accountant aside, there's evidence he's been filing fake taxes and collecting fraudulent refunds for years.
We get Jeff's, Mr Perfect Accountant, POV as he hides out in a shack he bought several hundred miles away - apparently he's never felt like a real man with Laura. She's been busily arranging their lives without any input from him, complete with vacations to beaches when he hates hot weather, for 20 years. Now he knows the IRS is onto him, and he just splits with no trace. Who cares what the repercussions are for his family, his children? Not him.
We meet Laura's mother, the cold academic bitch who does nothing but criticize and psychoanalyze Laura with every word.
We meet Jeff's brother Christian, the badass who's wrecked so many family gatherings - and learn that Christian and Laura had a youthful love affair before she met Jeff, and both still carry a torch for the other.
We meet Daphne, Laura's best friend and lawyer - and it's transparent she's the one who had been having an affair with Jeff before he left. Then Daphne jumps into bed with the IRS agent. Oh yeah, she's a good friend, huh?
What a sucky story this was - Christian comes in to help Laura, the two of them get back together before Laura even files for divorce (now we have 2 cases of adultery). Her teenage son gets accused of date rape. The town paper smears their family name in every issue. Why? Well, the answer to that solves another mystery - who is Christian's real father?
How can all this be resolved?? Oh I'll tell you. After revealing himself one last time to Laura, Jeff fakes his death - he'd already set up a new identity and the FBI searched for 6 weeks and gave up. Christian asks Laura to marry him. The IRS agent asks Daphne to marry him (even though he figured out she was the one having the affair with Jeff...). Jeff takes up with a simple-minded brain-damaged woman. Three HEAs, all wrong, all doomed, in my opinion.
Who was the woman betrayed? ME for reading what I thought was going to be an uplifting story by an author whose other works I've read were.
Gawd. Now I need to find something good to read to cleanse the palate of this awful, Peyton Place story. I want ROMANCE!!! 1 star. Gawd.
Even though there are, if you look at it clinically, a number of HEAs for some of the characters, really, I hated this story. Let's be honest = if you define HEA as a couple considering marrying at the end, then yeah, HEA. But if you try to figure out who the H/H were, no.
I started it last night, figuring with 3 novels in an 800 page book, it couldn't be very long. (It was 300 of the 800.) Then, when the story took so many bad turns, I felt compelled to read it until I finished this morning. I need the HEA. I needed to have these people's issues resolved, to know what happened, and why. Everything that was happening was so awful, I just had to know it all worked out.
And now that I'm done, I feel awful that I read it. It wasn't a romance. I guess it was just fiction, maybe women's fiction. The "heroine" Laura was such a flawed woman. I'm sorry for her very existence, fictional or otherwise, because she made so many wrong choices and was involved in so much hurt. The endings - offers of marriage, foreshadowings of things working out in the future - were so bleak. The resolutions were so unrealistic. Laura needs major therapy, and new friends. Her easy forgiving of her husband and her best friend was just not RIGHT!
First - her perfect accountant husband, always punctual, doesn't show up for dinner. Then he's gone for several days. Her two perfect teenage children, one in college, gather close by for the vigil - then the IRS sends in an agent because, Mr Perfect Accountant aside, there's evidence he's been filing fake taxes and collecting fraudulent refunds for years.
We get Jeff's, Mr Perfect Accountant, POV as he hides out in a shack he bought several hundred miles away - apparently he's never felt like a real man with Laura. She's been busily arranging their lives without any input from him, complete with vacations to beaches when he hates hot weather, for 20 years. Now he knows the IRS is onto him, and he just splits with no trace. Who cares what the repercussions are for his family, his children? Not him.
We meet Laura's mother, the cold academic bitch who does nothing but criticize and psychoanalyze Laura with every word.
We meet Jeff's brother Christian, the badass who's wrecked so many family gatherings - and learn that Christian and Laura had a youthful love affair before she met Jeff, and both still carry a torch for the other.
We meet Daphne, Laura's best friend and lawyer - and it's transparent she's the one who had been having an affair with Jeff before he left. Then Daphne jumps into bed with the IRS agent. Oh yeah, she's a good friend, huh?
What a sucky story this was - Christian comes in to help Laura, the two of them get back together before Laura even files for divorce (now we have 2 cases of adultery). Her teenage son gets accused of date rape. The town paper smears their family name in every issue. Why? Well, the answer to that solves another mystery - who is Christian's real father?
How can all this be resolved?? Oh I'll tell you. After revealing himself one last time to Laura, Jeff fakes his death - he'd already set up a new identity and the FBI searched for 6 weeks and gave up. Christian asks Laura to marry him. The IRS agent asks Daphne to marry him (even though he figured out she was the one having the affair with Jeff...). Jeff takes up with a simple-minded brain-damaged woman. Three HEAs, all wrong, all doomed, in my opinion.
Who was the woman betrayed? ME for reading what I thought was going to be an uplifting story by an author whose other works I've read were.
Gawd. Now I need to find something good to read to cleanse the palate of this awful, Peyton Place story. I want ROMANCE!!! 1 star. Gawd.
Monday, February 2, 2009
The Passions of Chelsea Kane by Barbara Delinsky ***
This is an older book (1992 - omigawd, who thought I would ever refer to something from 1992 as "older"???) and it shows in the story. I've liked the Delinsky books I've read, but this one was just a mediocre/average read, and it was long too!
The book opens with a birth scene - no one is identified, but the mother gives the child up for adoption, then we are left wondering what happened to the mother. Then we move on to the life of Chelsea Kane, a 37-year-old single woman, an architect in a small firm with her long-time best male friend and another woman (who played practically only a walk-on scene the whole book). She's also an adoptee (could it be...?) and her adopted mother has recently passed away. She had everything she ever wanted - wealth, success - except knowing who she really was and a good man.
She tried out the partner/best male friend for size, and even though they had been friends for life, and even though both sets of parents were pressuring them HARD to get married, they had never been ... intimate. So, what the heck, they did it and man, was Carl virile or what? Not only did he get her pregnant that one time, he was also doing another woman AND SHE GOT PREGNANT TOO. I say, hand the man a box of condoms! Sheesh!
As it turned out, he was more in love with Other Woman, and married her, so Chelsea never got around to telling him he was the father of her unborn child. Which I thought sucked.
Chelsea learns, somehow, that she has ties to a small town in New Hampshire, and since she's an architect who uses granite, she recognizes the name of the town as one they've bought granite from before. She up and invests in the granite company, against the better judgement of the current owner, and then buys a house and just moves to this town.
This is not one of those cozy, cute, warm and loving little towns like Robyn Carr's Virgin River or Grace Valley. No sirree, this town is in-bred to the max, and if you aren't from there - meaning, if your last name isn't a street name and you can't trace your genealogy back to the founding father - then you're an outsider, never to be trusted.
Also this town is stuck in the pre-women's lib era. No woman should be seen in exercise clothes. No women's knees, please. And there's some dirty little secrets - affairs, spousal abuse - and these are condoned because the surnames are those of the founding fathers. So you can just imagine the hardships Chelsea faced as major investor in the town's largest industry, and as unmarried pregnant newcomer to boot.
It has some romance-ish overtones. There's Judd, who supports his father who has Alzheimer's, even though he had college and plans to move away. There's Hunter - who's his father? And, hmmmmm, is he EXACTLY the same age as Chelsea?? Yeah, no spoilers here but it didn't take a magnifying glass to read between the lines on that issue. At least she and he were never attracted to each other, which would have been soooo squicky.
All the conflicts revolved around Chelsea and the decisions she made, so it falls pretty strongly into Women's Fiction for me. Single career woman, multiple partners (ok, just Carl and Judd), parental conflict, some slight suspense over some half-hearted attempts to scare Chelsea with ghosts and cut phone wires - yada, yada, yada, blah, blah, blah. Not bad, just nothing special. 3 stars and I only get to add it to one challenge (A To Z Author) - no pirates, not by Lisa Kleypas, hasn't been in my TBR forever. Dang!
The book opens with a birth scene - no one is identified, but the mother gives the child up for adoption, then we are left wondering what happened to the mother. Then we move on to the life of Chelsea Kane, a 37-year-old single woman, an architect in a small firm with her long-time best male friend and another woman (who played practically only a walk-on scene the whole book). She's also an adoptee (could it be...?) and her adopted mother has recently passed away. She had everything she ever wanted - wealth, success - except knowing who she really was and a good man.
She tried out the partner/best male friend for size, and even though they had been friends for life, and even though both sets of parents were pressuring them HARD to get married, they had never been ... intimate. So, what the heck, they did it and man, was Carl virile or what? Not only did he get her pregnant that one time, he was also doing another woman AND SHE GOT PREGNANT TOO. I say, hand the man a box of condoms! Sheesh!
As it turned out, he was more in love with Other Woman, and married her, so Chelsea never got around to telling him he was the father of her unborn child. Which I thought sucked.
Chelsea learns, somehow, that she has ties to a small town in New Hampshire, and since she's an architect who uses granite, she recognizes the name of the town as one they've bought granite from before. She up and invests in the granite company, against the better judgement of the current owner, and then buys a house and just moves to this town.
This is not one of those cozy, cute, warm and loving little towns like Robyn Carr's Virgin River or Grace Valley. No sirree, this town is in-bred to the max, and if you aren't from there - meaning, if your last name isn't a street name and you can't trace your genealogy back to the founding father - then you're an outsider, never to be trusted.
Also this town is stuck in the pre-women's lib era. No woman should be seen in exercise clothes. No women's knees, please. And there's some dirty little secrets - affairs, spousal abuse - and these are condoned because the surnames are those of the founding fathers. So you can just imagine the hardships Chelsea faced as major investor in the town's largest industry, and as unmarried pregnant newcomer to boot.
It has some romance-ish overtones. There's Judd, who supports his father who has Alzheimer's, even though he had college and plans to move away. There's Hunter - who's his father? And, hmmmmm, is he EXACTLY the same age as Chelsea?? Yeah, no spoilers here but it didn't take a magnifying glass to read between the lines on that issue. At least she and he were never attracted to each other, which would have been soooo squicky.
All the conflicts revolved around Chelsea and the decisions she made, so it falls pretty strongly into Women's Fiction for me. Single career woman, multiple partners (ok, just Carl and Judd), parental conflict, some slight suspense over some half-hearted attempts to scare Chelsea with ghosts and cut phone wires - yada, yada, yada, blah, blah, blah. Not bad, just nothing special. 3 stars and I only get to add it to one challenge (A To Z Author) - no pirates, not by Lisa Kleypas, hasn't been in my TBR forever. Dang!
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
The House on Olive Street by Robyn Carr ***
This is the story of 5 women authors and how the tragic death of one of them changed their lives.
I've enjoyed the Grace Valley series and the Virgin River series by Carr. This one is women's fiction - it follows the lives of the 4 women left after one of the group, Gabby, is found dead on her 50th birthday from an aneurysm. The women had an ongoing writers' circle: one was Elly, the academic, and the oldest; Sable, a best-selling author with a secret; Barbara Ann, who writes category romance relatively successfully but yearns to break out of the mold and write best-sellers like Sable; and Beth - hmm I can't recall Beth's books, but she is shy and the youngest...
In addition to their lives as writers, each has completely different personal lives: Elly, long divorced, is thought to be a spinster but actually has a regular lover that she never introduces to the group. Sable lives isolated, afraid of having her past life found out, and afraid to have personal relationships. Barbara Ann has 4 young adult sons, all still living at home, and a loving if clueless husband - all her money gets sucked up by the boys needing toys, and she feels unappreciated by her family and her editor. Beth has a handsome womanizing abusive husband.
After Gabby dies, the women find a letter she has written to them (something she writes every New Year's Day) asking them to handle her paperwork. We learn about Gabby's life through a fictional autobiography she was writing that the 4 women try to finish for her. Eventually they all end up moving into Gabby's house for the summer, and create their own family group, including Gabby's mother and children and even Gabby's ex-husband.
It was a nice light read but wasn't as emotionally satisfying as the series I mentioned above. But it has been in my TBR a long time, so I'm fitting it into the "read something that's been on the TBR a long time, out with the old, in with the new" category!! 3 stars
I've enjoyed the Grace Valley series and the Virgin River series by Carr. This one is women's fiction - it follows the lives of the 4 women left after one of the group, Gabby, is found dead on her 50th birthday from an aneurysm. The women had an ongoing writers' circle: one was Elly, the academic, and the oldest; Sable, a best-selling author with a secret; Barbara Ann, who writes category romance relatively successfully but yearns to break out of the mold and write best-sellers like Sable; and Beth - hmm I can't recall Beth's books, but she is shy and the youngest...
In addition to their lives as writers, each has completely different personal lives: Elly, long divorced, is thought to be a spinster but actually has a regular lover that she never introduces to the group. Sable lives isolated, afraid of having her past life found out, and afraid to have personal relationships. Barbara Ann has 4 young adult sons, all still living at home, and a loving if clueless husband - all her money gets sucked up by the boys needing toys, and she feels unappreciated by her family and her editor. Beth has a handsome womanizing abusive husband.
After Gabby dies, the women find a letter she has written to them (something she writes every New Year's Day) asking them to handle her paperwork. We learn about Gabby's life through a fictional autobiography she was writing that the 4 women try to finish for her. Eventually they all end up moving into Gabby's house for the summer, and create their own family group, including Gabby's mother and children and even Gabby's ex-husband.
It was a nice light read but wasn't as emotionally satisfying as the series I mentioned above. But it has been in my TBR a long time, so I'm fitting it into the "read something that's been on the TBR a long time, out with the old, in with the new" category!! 3 stars
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Down By The River by Robyn Carr ****
This is the last in the Grace Valley trilogy, and I think it's the best of the 3! It had a terrific, romantic ending with HEAs for a bunch of the characters, as well as some tension, some new characters and some re-appearances, and the continuation of our old friends - June and Jim, June's dad Elmer and her aunt Myrna, George the cafe owner, Chris and Nancy, John and Susan.
In the last book, we learned that June - silly doctor - had never gotten around to actually using the diaphragm she got as birth control, meanwhile telling Jim she couldn't get pregnant, and lo and behold she was pregnant. As soon as Jim learned that, he rushed to the scene, ready to wed. However, June - silly woman - wasn't sure marriage was the answer, since both had been single and independent for so long. Go figure. As long as everyone pushed, she refused to agree. Then a good friend mentioned something that made her reconsider...
In this book we learn the identity of Myrna's long-time penpal, a funny surprise. The new Presbyterian preacher Harry is a likable fellow, even though he does keep borrowing money from everyone. Jurea Mull continues to thrive, but Clarence spends most of the book in the VA hospital being treated for his PTSD. A new family shows up, and Sam the garage owner adopts them, after trying to run the no-good father away.
Where the previous book was about Women Getting Even, this book was more about healing and family. Jim's family comes for Christmas - his sister Annie, her husband and 2 kids - just in time to help June make some important decisions and to help the town in a crisis. Even Harry's ex-wife makes an appearance and is there as family for Harry when he needs help. Myrna's family is brought back together, and Chris and Nancy face some important family decisions.
It was a great ending to the series, and I recommend reading them all, in order, before reading the Virgin River series, since so many of these characters make appearances in those books too. I like Carr's writing style, although she needs a better editor - please, "calvary" for "cavalry" is one of the worst typos!! And "what" for "want" at one point - and there was a section in book #2 that I know had to have been completely out of order, June's ultra-sound. When it came up, I kept thinking, did she get a second ultra-sound?? No, but it was out of order and the details of the ultra-sound were already mentioned several times before this section appeared. Threw me for a loop.
Ah, fictional small towns are truly fun to read and fantasize about - and Carr, while romanticizing it, doesn't pull any punches - there's drug addiction, and spousal abuse, and death - but underneath is this community that cares (maybe too nosey at times) and sticks together.
I'd consider it for more than 4 stars - I liked it better than book #2 but it can't compete with Virgin River or any of my other favorite 5 star reads.
In the last book, we learned that June - silly doctor - had never gotten around to actually using the diaphragm she got as birth control, meanwhile telling Jim she couldn't get pregnant, and lo and behold she was pregnant. As soon as Jim learned that, he rushed to the scene, ready to wed. However, June - silly woman - wasn't sure marriage was the answer, since both had been single and independent for so long. Go figure. As long as everyone pushed, she refused to agree. Then a good friend mentioned something that made her reconsider...
In this book we learn the identity of Myrna's long-time penpal, a funny surprise. The new Presbyterian preacher Harry is a likable fellow, even though he does keep borrowing money from everyone. Jurea Mull continues to thrive, but Clarence spends most of the book in the VA hospital being treated for his PTSD. A new family shows up, and Sam the garage owner adopts them, after trying to run the no-good father away.
Where the previous book was about Women Getting Even, this book was more about healing and family. Jim's family comes for Christmas - his sister Annie, her husband and 2 kids - just in time to help June make some important decisions and to help the town in a crisis. Even Harry's ex-wife makes an appearance and is there as family for Harry when he needs help. Myrna's family is brought back together, and Chris and Nancy face some important family decisions.
It was a great ending to the series, and I recommend reading them all, in order, before reading the Virgin River series, since so many of these characters make appearances in those books too. I like Carr's writing style, although she needs a better editor - please, "calvary" for "cavalry" is one of the worst typos!! And "what" for "want" at one point - and there was a section in book #2 that I know had to have been completely out of order, June's ultra-sound. When it came up, I kept thinking, did she get a second ultra-sound?? No, but it was out of order and the details of the ultra-sound were already mentioned several times before this section appeared. Threw me for a loop.
Ah, fictional small towns are truly fun to read and fantasize about - and Carr, while romanticizing it, doesn't pull any punches - there's drug addiction, and spousal abuse, and death - but underneath is this community that cares (maybe too nosey at times) and sticks together.
I'd consider it for more than 4 stars - I liked it better than book #2 but it can't compete with Virgin River or any of my other favorite 5 star reads.
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Just Over The Mountain by Robyn Carr ****
This is the 2nd in the Grace Valley trilogy, and maybe because I'm already familiar with the town and its inhabitants, I liked this one a little better than the first one, so I went with 4 stars.
We already know June, the 2nd doctor Hudson, and her widowed doctor dad Elmer - we're familiar with newcomer John Stone, the new doc at the clinic, as well as his wife Susan. The shadowy DEA agent Jim makes a couple of clandestine appearances and phone calls. The regulars are all there - Aunt Myrna, George at the cafe, the poker playing buddies, the quilting circle.
There's a very strong theme in this book that was also in the first book, although not as prominent - women being treated as less than first class citizens. Women being treated with disrespect and taken advantage of by their spouses. Women struggling - well, maybe struggling is too strong a word - attempting to take back their dignity and to establish their own ways in life. Women who've had enough and aren't going to take it anymore. In fact, a lot of the women in the story are still worked up about incidents from the first story - and they are establishing the New Ground Rules for the men.
There's Susan and Julianna - Susan (the new doc's wife) was a nurse before they had a child, and is now in the position of stay at home mom. Julianna is a long-time resident and Susan's new BFF; she and Mike have 5 kids and she is also a stay at home mom, by choice. The two of them were the ones who organized the boycott to get the womanizing preacher in story 1 to pack up and leave. After the town's nurse, Charlotte, has a major heart attack, Susan steps in to help out at the clinic - and she's even better than Charlotte! June wants to ask her to stay, but John makes it clear Susan has no career ambitions.
Too bad John didn't ask Susan about that first - Susan approaches June about the job, and now June is caught in the cross-fire. Seems Susan isn't as fulfilled taking care of John and their daughter as John hoped... When their argument comes up in front of their buddies, Julianna and Mike, Mike and John dig their own graves with an attempt at humor and end up insulting both women and their choices. The men are both facing sleeping on the couch for the foreseeable future!
Another couple in town is having trouble too - long-time residents Blythe and Daniel. It seems Daniel has decided to move in with another woman - and apparently he and the other woman have been seeing each other for 2 years. But there's more to their story, and it takes a while to straighten out the details. When Daniel also has a heart attack (lots of heart attacks in the story), the town is forced to recognize there's a situation, and nobody is exactly sure how to help.
The backwoods couple from book 1, Clarence and Jurea, also have some issues. Clarence was fine after being treated for PTSD in book 1, and Jurea got plastic surgery to fix a childhood scar that had horribly disfigured her. But Clarence, believing his family no longer needs him after the surgery, goes off his meds and leaves Jurea and the kids, going back to his paranoia, thinking the Viet Cong are invading.
Aunt Myrna has some men troubles of her own. Her husband disappeared twenty years before, and since she's a murder mystery writer, her books have often contained a plot where the wife kills the husband and buries him in the back yard - but is that what happened to him? A mysterious man shows up in town and discovers proof that there's a body buried in the bushes...
To top it all off, June's first love comes home to live with mom and dad for a while - divorced from his wife, 2 teenage sons in tow - and he's reinforcing the rumors that he's hoping to strike up the old sparks with June. June isn't really receptive though ... at least, she thinks she's not. But is he playing her just like he did 20 years ago when he dumped her?
What are women to do with all these men treating them so badly? Well, it's a multi-pronged approach, and the book chronicles all the prongs. Carr has a way of writing about the residents that's homey and fun and also warm and even sad sometimes. I cried when a resident died of cancer after making some hard, and maybe unwise choices about health care; I was jubilant for Jessica getting her GED and wanting to start college. And of course, there's a romantic moment or two, and a sweet ending, when the mystery guy comes in from the cold.
I guess my feeling that she had known him from before was wrong - he seems to have been a stranger when they met. What a great fantasy that is, huh? Mystery guy sneaks into your house for a handful of clandestine midnight rendezvous, and you can't tell anyone you even have a sex life??
We already know June, the 2nd doctor Hudson, and her widowed doctor dad Elmer - we're familiar with newcomer John Stone, the new doc at the clinic, as well as his wife Susan. The shadowy DEA agent Jim makes a couple of clandestine appearances and phone calls. The regulars are all there - Aunt Myrna, George at the cafe, the poker playing buddies, the quilting circle.
There's a very strong theme in this book that was also in the first book, although not as prominent - women being treated as less than first class citizens. Women being treated with disrespect and taken advantage of by their spouses. Women struggling - well, maybe struggling is too strong a word - attempting to take back their dignity and to establish their own ways in life. Women who've had enough and aren't going to take it anymore. In fact, a lot of the women in the story are still worked up about incidents from the first story - and they are establishing the New Ground Rules for the men.
There's Susan and Julianna - Susan (the new doc's wife) was a nurse before they had a child, and is now in the position of stay at home mom. Julianna is a long-time resident and Susan's new BFF; she and Mike have 5 kids and she is also a stay at home mom, by choice. The two of them were the ones who organized the boycott to get the womanizing preacher in story 1 to pack up and leave. After the town's nurse, Charlotte, has a major heart attack, Susan steps in to help out at the clinic - and she's even better than Charlotte! June wants to ask her to stay, but John makes it clear Susan has no career ambitions.
Too bad John didn't ask Susan about that first - Susan approaches June about the job, and now June is caught in the cross-fire. Seems Susan isn't as fulfilled taking care of John and their daughter as John hoped... When their argument comes up in front of their buddies, Julianna and Mike, Mike and John dig their own graves with an attempt at humor and end up insulting both women and their choices. The men are both facing sleeping on the couch for the foreseeable future!
Another couple in town is having trouble too - long-time residents Blythe and Daniel. It seems Daniel has decided to move in with another woman - and apparently he and the other woman have been seeing each other for 2 years. But there's more to their story, and it takes a while to straighten out the details. When Daniel also has a heart attack (lots of heart attacks in the story), the town is forced to recognize there's a situation, and nobody is exactly sure how to help.
The backwoods couple from book 1, Clarence and Jurea, also have some issues. Clarence was fine after being treated for PTSD in book 1, and Jurea got plastic surgery to fix a childhood scar that had horribly disfigured her. But Clarence, believing his family no longer needs him after the surgery, goes off his meds and leaves Jurea and the kids, going back to his paranoia, thinking the Viet Cong are invading.
Aunt Myrna has some men troubles of her own. Her husband disappeared twenty years before, and since she's a murder mystery writer, her books have often contained a plot where the wife kills the husband and buries him in the back yard - but is that what happened to him? A mysterious man shows up in town and discovers proof that there's a body buried in the bushes...
To top it all off, June's first love comes home to live with mom and dad for a while - divorced from his wife, 2 teenage sons in tow - and he's reinforcing the rumors that he's hoping to strike up the old sparks with June. June isn't really receptive though ... at least, she thinks she's not. But is he playing her just like he did 20 years ago when he dumped her?
What are women to do with all these men treating them so badly? Well, it's a multi-pronged approach, and the book chronicles all the prongs. Carr has a way of writing about the residents that's homey and fun and also warm and even sad sometimes. I cried when a resident died of cancer after making some hard, and maybe unwise choices about health care; I was jubilant for Jessica getting her GED and wanting to start college. And of course, there's a romantic moment or two, and a sweet ending, when the mystery guy comes in from the cold.
I guess my feeling that she had known him from before was wrong - he seems to have been a stranger when they met. What a great fantasy that is, huh? Mystery guy sneaks into your house for a handful of clandestine midnight rendezvous, and you can't tell anyone you even have a sex life??
Monday, January 19, 2009
Deep In The Valley by Robyn Carr ***
My first Robyn Carr book was book 1 in the Virgin River series, Virgin River (my review here), and I loved it! I realized there was another series before it that introduced some of the Grace Valley characters that appeared in Virgin River, so I started a mini-glom. Wouldn't you know, I lost one of the books (probably packed in a box somewhere) in my move, so I ordered another and started the series last night. This one is also a trilogy, followed by Just Over The Mountain and Down By The River.
June Hudson is the town doctor of Grace Valley, daughter of the retired town doctor Elmer Hudson. She grew up there and left only long enough to get her degree. She's 37 and in addition to everything else going on around Grace Valley, her biological time clock is ticking loud in her ears.
The area's population has grown, and she interviews a new doctor to help out at the clinic. John Stone seems to fit the bill - he's a OB/GYN looking to get out of the big city and raise his family in a small town. His recommendations and references are great, he's good looking to boot - what's not to like? She just hopes he realizes that leaving the big city doesn't leave behind the troubles: Grace Valley also has a large drug problem, with marijuana growers secreted deep in the mountains and unsavory characters and activities in the shadows. Grace Valley also has other troubles - the womanizing preacher, the backwoods family headed by a Vietnam vet still suffering from PTSD, spousal abuse.
When one of June's patients implies that the new doc might have touched her inappropriately, June goes on a fact-finding mission that brings in mixed results - some of his colleagues think Dr Stone hung the moon, and others have a much lower opinion of him.
In the midst of the regular day-to-day activities of their small town, a couple of beefy guys show up at the clinic one night, one of them with a gun-shot wound. The other holds a gun on her until she patches his friend up. But something about this guy Jim doesn't fit with the criminal activity...
This series is more Women's Fiction than romance - the story revolves mainly around June and her life, and the addition of late night trysts with a secret DEA agent is just spice, without much in the way of romance. In fact, I woke up wondering if the DEA agent was a stranger to her when he showed up or if he might have actually been someone she knew before... (now I have to go back and find the references...)
I enjoyed it, but didn't find it keeper material - I'm giving it 3 stars "I Liked It". It just didn't give me the same warm and cozy feel that I got from Virgin River - I didn't end it wanting to pack up and move to Grace Valley like I did Virgin River. It fits my Serial Readers Challenge and the A to Z Challenge.
June Hudson is the town doctor of Grace Valley, daughter of the retired town doctor Elmer Hudson. She grew up there and left only long enough to get her degree. She's 37 and in addition to everything else going on around Grace Valley, her biological time clock is ticking loud in her ears.
The area's population has grown, and she interviews a new doctor to help out at the clinic. John Stone seems to fit the bill - he's a OB/GYN looking to get out of the big city and raise his family in a small town. His recommendations and references are great, he's good looking to boot - what's not to like? She just hopes he realizes that leaving the big city doesn't leave behind the troubles: Grace Valley also has a large drug problem, with marijuana growers secreted deep in the mountains and unsavory characters and activities in the shadows. Grace Valley also has other troubles - the womanizing preacher, the backwoods family headed by a Vietnam vet still suffering from PTSD, spousal abuse.
When one of June's patients implies that the new doc might have touched her inappropriately, June goes on a fact-finding mission that brings in mixed results - some of his colleagues think Dr Stone hung the moon, and others have a much lower opinion of him.
In the midst of the regular day-to-day activities of their small town, a couple of beefy guys show up at the clinic one night, one of them with a gun-shot wound. The other holds a gun on her until she patches his friend up. But something about this guy Jim doesn't fit with the criminal activity...
This series is more Women's Fiction than romance - the story revolves mainly around June and her life, and the addition of late night trysts with a secret DEA agent is just spice, without much in the way of romance. In fact, I woke up wondering if the DEA agent was a stranger to her when he showed up or if he might have actually been someone she knew before... (now I have to go back and find the references...)
I enjoyed it, but didn't find it keeper material - I'm giving it 3 stars "I Liked It". It just didn't give me the same warm and cozy feel that I got from Virgin River - I didn't end it wanting to pack up and move to Grace Valley like I did Virgin River. It fits my Serial Readers Challenge and the A to Z Challenge.
Thursday, December 18, 2008
The Woman Next Door by Barbara Delinsky ****
The Woman Next Door is women's fiction, and the story is about 4 women neighbors. Three of the women are married and have been friends for several years. The 4th woman is recently widowed - she was the second (and much younger) wife of an older man - the 3 women had been friends with his first wife who died years before. They had never become friendly with her (Gretchen) although all 3 husbands had - they had each helped her out when she needed it.
The main couple is Amanda and Graham - I believe they are the youngest of the 3 married couples, and have only been married about 5 years. Graham came from a large Catholic family, and there was a lot of pressure on them to have children. They wanted children, but had not conceived, even with a year of infertility counseling and treatments.
Georgia runs her own company, and is out of town a lot. Lucky for her, her husband is a journalist who works from home and takes care of the kids. Karen is a SAHM with 4 kids - her husband is a womanizer and a past adulterer, supposedly reformed.
When they all discover Gretchen is 7 months pregnant - and no boyfriend around - each grapples with the insecurities of wondering if her husband was the one. Delinsky spends the most time with Amanda and Graham - not only are they dealing with their own disappointment with not conceiving, but there is enormous pressure from his family, especially his mother, to have children - as though they are slackers or aren't doing it right or something. Amanda is the school psychologist/counselor, and there's the issue of her working and allowing her work to be overtake family life, especially when a tragedy strikes at the school. The tragedy affects the children of the neighbors, and Amanda and Graham both deal with the fallout from that as well.
I've liked the Delinsky books I've read, although I was more in the mood for something a little lighter or maybe a little more about the couple and less about the conflicts of extended family (I wanted to smack Graham's mother...) - this one seemed to have more angst and conflict in it than Lake News and An Accidental Woman. 4 stars all the same.
The main couple is Amanda and Graham - I believe they are the youngest of the 3 married couples, and have only been married about 5 years. Graham came from a large Catholic family, and there was a lot of pressure on them to have children. They wanted children, but had not conceived, even with a year of infertility counseling and treatments.
Georgia runs her own company, and is out of town a lot. Lucky for her, her husband is a journalist who works from home and takes care of the kids. Karen is a SAHM with 4 kids - her husband is a womanizer and a past adulterer, supposedly reformed.
When they all discover Gretchen is 7 months pregnant - and no boyfriend around - each grapples with the insecurities of wondering if her husband was the one. Delinsky spends the most time with Amanda and Graham - not only are they dealing with their own disappointment with not conceiving, but there is enormous pressure from his family, especially his mother, to have children - as though they are slackers or aren't doing it right or something. Amanda is the school psychologist/counselor, and there's the issue of her working and allowing her work to be overtake family life, especially when a tragedy strikes at the school. The tragedy affects the children of the neighbors, and Amanda and Graham both deal with the fallout from that as well.
I've liked the Delinsky books I've read, although I was more in the mood for something a little lighter or maybe a little more about the couple and less about the conflicts of extended family (I wanted to smack Graham's mother...) - this one seemed to have more angst and conflict in it than Lake News and An Accidental Woman. 4 stars all the same.
Saturday, December 13, 2008
A Virgin River Christmas by Robyn Carr ***
This is the 4th in the Virgin River series, and it introduces 2 completely new characters (unless they were mentioned in the 3rd one and I don't remember) - Ian Buchanan and Marcie Sullivan.
Ian is a former Marine who is now a hermit in the mountains near Virgin River, and Marcie is the widow of a Marine who served under Ian in Iraq. In fact, Ian was the one who saved Bobby when he was hit - but Bobby never recovered, and spent a few years unresponsive and comatose before passing. Ian had only visited one time - and apparently his emotional scars from Iraq were enough that he left the Marines and went into hiding. Marcie has spent several months looking for him, determined to let him know about Bobby's death and also how much Bobby had looked up to him.
When she finally finds him, he tries to chase her away, but she's stubborn and determined and will not be run off. However, she's picked up the flu, and he ends up having to nurse her in his hermit cabin for a week while she recovers. She chips away at him slowly, getting him to come out of his shell, and eventually a relationship develops.
It's a nice story and I enjoyed it, but somehow the magic of the 1st book in the series was never recreated in the subsequent sequels, so it never rose above a 3 "liked it" for me.
Ian is a former Marine who is now a hermit in the mountains near Virgin River, and Marcie is the widow of a Marine who served under Ian in Iraq. In fact, Ian was the one who saved Bobby when he was hit - but Bobby never recovered, and spent a few years unresponsive and comatose before passing. Ian had only visited one time - and apparently his emotional scars from Iraq were enough that he left the Marines and went into hiding. Marcie has spent several months looking for him, determined to let him know about Bobby's death and also how much Bobby had looked up to him.
When she finally finds him, he tries to chase her away, but she's stubborn and determined and will not be run off. However, she's picked up the flu, and he ends up having to nurse her in his hermit cabin for a week while she recovers. She chips away at him slowly, getting him to come out of his shell, and eventually a relationship develops.
It's a nice story and I enjoyed it, but somehow the magic of the 1st book in the series was never recreated in the subsequent sequels, so it never rose above a 3 "liked it" for me.
Friday, December 12, 2008
Shelter Mountain by Robyn Carr ***
I might be in a reading slump, or maybe I can blame it on Preacher's "voice" - I liked this book but not nearly as much as the first one in the series, Virgin River. I found Preacher's POV a little too - too good, too humble, too unbelievably platonic and a little too gosh-ish. And I found his tendency to think of violence in reference to the husband - who, after all, was a violently abusive man, a little creepy too. Maybe that was realistic, but still...
This is Preacher's story. An obviously abused woman shows up in the bar at Virgin River with a 3-year-old, and Preacher manages to convince her not only to stay for the night in an extra room over the bar but also to see Mel, the midwife/heroine of Virgin River, the next day. In the cocoon of all the great folks of Virgin River, Paige and Christopher slowly come out and admit to the horror that was their life before - Wes, the abusive over-achiever husband, was out for blood. He hadn't wanted Christopher, and he really didn't want the baby she carried now. She was on her way to a safe house in Oregon when she got lost trying to use back road to avoid detection.
It might seem that John/Preacher would be the last man she'd be attracted to - at 6'6", he's a bear of a man but really, make that Teddy Bear. He's shy to the point of never acting at all on his attraction - and he's head over heels for Christopher, for whom he is a true role model and hero.
As in Virgin River, the hero and heroine are not given the most copy in the book (hence the genre women's fiction, not romance) while we learn the story of teenagers Rick and Liz, who are expecting a child from their one encounter without a condom, more about Mel and Jack and how Mel is doing with her pregnancy. We also meet Jack's sister Brie and his Marine buddy Mike who are the focus of the next book (which I read out of order: Whispering Rock). Because of the way the books are structured, they make more sense and you enjoy the characters more if you already know them and their back story, which is not recreated in the sequels.
I did like it - maybe 3.5 stars - but I found John/Preacher's voice - ponderous? Well, it grated on me after a while - it was almost like he was simple aka mentally disabled, although I'm pretty sure we're supposed to get that he is merely extremely shy and inexperienced with women, and simple as in simple tastes.
So it gets 3 stars "liked it" from me.
This is Preacher's story. An obviously abused woman shows up in the bar at Virgin River with a 3-year-old, and Preacher manages to convince her not only to stay for the night in an extra room over the bar but also to see Mel, the midwife/heroine of Virgin River, the next day. In the cocoon of all the great folks of Virgin River, Paige and Christopher slowly come out and admit to the horror that was their life before - Wes, the abusive over-achiever husband, was out for blood. He hadn't wanted Christopher, and he really didn't want the baby she carried now. She was on her way to a safe house in Oregon when she got lost trying to use back road to avoid detection.
It might seem that John/Preacher would be the last man she'd be attracted to - at 6'6", he's a bear of a man but really, make that Teddy Bear. He's shy to the point of never acting at all on his attraction - and he's head over heels for Christopher, for whom he is a true role model and hero.
As in Virgin River, the hero and heroine are not given the most copy in the book (hence the genre women's fiction, not romance) while we learn the story of teenagers Rick and Liz, who are expecting a child from their one encounter without a condom, more about Mel and Jack and how Mel is doing with her pregnancy. We also meet Jack's sister Brie and his Marine buddy Mike who are the focus of the next book (which I read out of order: Whispering Rock). Because of the way the books are structured, they make more sense and you enjoy the characters more if you already know them and their back story, which is not recreated in the sequels.
I did like it - maybe 3.5 stars - but I found John/Preacher's voice - ponderous? Well, it grated on me after a while - it was almost like he was simple aka mentally disabled, although I'm pretty sure we're supposed to get that he is merely extremely shy and inexperienced with women, and simple as in simple tastes.
So it gets 3 stars "liked it" from me.
Saturday, November 29, 2008
Coast Road by Barbara Delinsky ****
Coast Road has an interesting premise - a woman, divorced from her ex for 6 years - is in a car accident and a coma for 16 days. During the 16 days, her ex comes to take care of their children, and also spends time with her, urging her to come back. And in the course of these 16 days, we learn of their relationship - how they met, how they came to live in San Francisco, what led to the divorce and where they are today, mostly from the POV of the hero since the heroine is in a coma.
In addition, we meet the new friends she has made in her new life without him - a book club group of women, the neighbors, work-related friends, as well as the players in his life - a business partner, a steady girlfriend pushing for commitment. It was an interesting way to bring a group together, in tragedy, to test their relationships and force them to look at their lives.
Rachel is an artist, working on a set of paintings for a solo exhibit coming up in 3 weeks, and raising her 2 teenage daughters alone in a small community. Her ex is Jack, an architect in San Francisco - a "Sunday dad" who takes his daughters on weekends from time to time, when he can fit it into his workaholic life.
It was his commitment to building his practice that drove the 2 of them apart. In the city, she seemed to need all his time, while he missed out on school plays and sports meets to jet around the country drumming up business. She had no friends, no outside life except him and the girls.. In her new life, she's surrounded with people who care, who seem to know her better even than he did. Where did they go wrong? He reminisces about meeting her in college, and changing his schedule to take classes with her, be with her. But somehow, along the way, they didn't ever put voice to their future plans, and where his life went, she no longer felt a part and didn't share the dream.
A rather nosy, buttinsky friend spends a lot of time at the hospital with Jack - if not for her, he might not have learned what he did about her new life, things that made him face the truth about his "abandonment" of her. The way he saw it, she left him - and he had never really stopped loving her. He moves into Rachel's home to take care of the girls, and being forced to be the parent in charge, learns to appreciate even more what Rachel has had to face without him. The older daughter is facing her first prom, and is pushing the limits by switching allegiances at school from her safe, known friends, to the faster crowd. Without Rachel there to ask questions and make phone calls, she's able to convince Jack these kids are fine and he should trust her. The younger daughter is griefing for her elderly cat who is on the verge of death, and she is struggling with abandonment as well - first dad, then the cat and now possibly her mother.
I can't decide if it's Romance or Women's Fiction - somehow, not having the heroine participate changes things, although we get a lot of perspective of her before the accident. But I liked it - 4 stars.
In addition, we meet the new friends she has made in her new life without him - a book club group of women, the neighbors, work-related friends, as well as the players in his life - a business partner, a steady girlfriend pushing for commitment. It was an interesting way to bring a group together, in tragedy, to test their relationships and force them to look at their lives.
Rachel is an artist, working on a set of paintings for a solo exhibit coming up in 3 weeks, and raising her 2 teenage daughters alone in a small community. Her ex is Jack, an architect in San Francisco - a "Sunday dad" who takes his daughters on weekends from time to time, when he can fit it into his workaholic life.
It was his commitment to building his practice that drove the 2 of them apart. In the city, she seemed to need all his time, while he missed out on school plays and sports meets to jet around the country drumming up business. She had no friends, no outside life except him and the girls.. In her new life, she's surrounded with people who care, who seem to know her better even than he did. Where did they go wrong? He reminisces about meeting her in college, and changing his schedule to take classes with her, be with her. But somehow, along the way, they didn't ever put voice to their future plans, and where his life went, she no longer felt a part and didn't share the dream.
A rather nosy, buttinsky friend spends a lot of time at the hospital with Jack - if not for her, he might not have learned what he did about her new life, things that made him face the truth about his "abandonment" of her. The way he saw it, she left him - and he had never really stopped loving her. He moves into Rachel's home to take care of the girls, and being forced to be the parent in charge, learns to appreciate even more what Rachel has had to face without him. The older daughter is facing her first prom, and is pushing the limits by switching allegiances at school from her safe, known friends, to the faster crowd. Without Rachel there to ask questions and make phone calls, she's able to convince Jack these kids are fine and he should trust her. The younger daughter is griefing for her elderly cat who is on the verge of death, and she is struggling with abandonment as well - first dad, then the cat and now possibly her mother.
I can't decide if it's Romance or Women's Fiction - somehow, not having the heroine participate changes things, although we get a lot of perspective of her before the accident. But I liked it - 4 stars.
Thursday, November 27, 2008
The Mulberry Tree by Jude Deveraux **
Ahhh... Jude Deveraux - sometimes I love her stories and sometimes... I don't.
I didn't love this one. At all.
The story revolves around Lillian Manville who changes her identity to Bailey after her wealthy husband Jimmie dies and leaves her nothing except a pittance in funds and a run-down farm in Virginia. The billions he leaves to his older brother and sister whom he despised - in fact they get everything, including Bailey's clothes.
The mystery is why - and to be honest, now that I've finished, I don't have a clue why. OK, I know the mystery but I still don't get WHY.
For one thing, when one dies and leaves everything to his/her spouse of 15 or so years, how can anyone contest that and win? Especially when the deceased is a billionaire? So that doesn't seem to be the real reason.
OK set that aside and follow Bailey's journey to discover herself. She was married at 17 to a man some years older than she, somewhere between 9 and 15 years (the years don't all add up in the book...) older, who was on the road to being rich and famous. He plucked her out of a local state or county fair where she was the winner of a jam contest - she was overweight and had an awful crooked, broken nose, but somehow she was the love of his life in the few minutes they spent together before getting married that same day. Go figure.
From the flashbacks and memories Bailey has, we learn that Jimmie did indeed seem to really treasure and love her. But he also had affairs - or seemed to, I guess (same thing in her mind). He was also incredibly, abusively controlling - he kept her fat and ugly and hidden away on purpose, to keep her dependent on him. Then he died and suddenly she was lost. Her mother dead, her only other living relative was her estranged sister; she really had no friends, no one - except Jimmie's lawyer who helped set her up in the farm house.
Then we meet the odd characters of the little town in Virginia. Creepy odd. At first I thought maybe it was going to be a paranormal, since the first 2 women we meet don't seem to think the other one exists. However, it is just a family feud, and they are cousins who don't speak to each other although they are constantly together. They are 2 of the more normal people in town.
Then we spend time with Bailey who is trying to figure out what to do with her life and while doing so, she stumbles over some town secrets. What do the secrets have to do with her? Wellll - maybe there's a connection between this town and her dead husband? Maybe that's the reason he left the billions to his brother and sister and not her?
By the time we get to the turning point in the mystery, I needed a damn scorecard to follow the players. Frankly, I didn't care enough to bother to find paper and write down who was married to whom, who was sleeping with whom, who the parents were of various people. It was a case of a group of small town bullies with a secret that they did everything they could to cover up - and succeeded for years. Where Bailey fits into the story is what you learn when you get to the end. (well, she doesn't really fit in - how's that for a spoiler?)
Since it turns out Jimmie knew the secret all along, why didn't he do something about it while he was alive?? Why did he let his brother and sister get away with so much? Were we supposed to believe he was planning on doing it later or something? And the biggest mystery of all is - why did so many people write positive reviews about this??
There is a (mild) love interest in the story - Matt. Well. I dunno. He's just a local guy, related to but unaware of the town's secret. But it really isn't Matt and Bailey's story - it is more a story of the town, as uncovered by Bailey while she tries to get on her feet after being left destitute by her dead billionaire husband. There was very little romance in this book - I'm not even going to tag it romance. One reviewer mentioned that she feels Deveraux is good at writing about women who have come to crossroads in their lives - maybe that's what I missed about this book, it was about a turning point and not about romance at all. There were several turning points - Bailey's, after Jimmie's death; Jimmie's, when he left the small town and became a billionaire - it seemed every character (and there were a bunch of them) had a major crossroad issue.
I didn't hate it and I finished it, so it gets 2 stars.
I didn't love this one. At all.
The story revolves around Lillian Manville who changes her identity to Bailey after her wealthy husband Jimmie dies and leaves her nothing except a pittance in funds and a run-down farm in Virginia. The billions he leaves to his older brother and sister whom he despised - in fact they get everything, including Bailey's clothes.
The mystery is why - and to be honest, now that I've finished, I don't have a clue why. OK, I know the mystery but I still don't get WHY.
For one thing, when one dies and leaves everything to his/her spouse of 15 or so years, how can anyone contest that and win? Especially when the deceased is a billionaire? So that doesn't seem to be the real reason.
OK set that aside and follow Bailey's journey to discover herself. She was married at 17 to a man some years older than she, somewhere between 9 and 15 years (the years don't all add up in the book...) older, who was on the road to being rich and famous. He plucked her out of a local state or county fair where she was the winner of a jam contest - she was overweight and had an awful crooked, broken nose, but somehow she was the love of his life in the few minutes they spent together before getting married that same day. Go figure.
From the flashbacks and memories Bailey has, we learn that Jimmie did indeed seem to really treasure and love her. But he also had affairs - or seemed to, I guess (same thing in her mind). He was also incredibly, abusively controlling - he kept her fat and ugly and hidden away on purpose, to keep her dependent on him. Then he died and suddenly she was lost. Her mother dead, her only other living relative was her estranged sister; she really had no friends, no one - except Jimmie's lawyer who helped set her up in the farm house.
Then we meet the odd characters of the little town in Virginia. Creepy odd. At first I thought maybe it was going to be a paranormal, since the first 2 women we meet don't seem to think the other one exists. However, it is just a family feud, and they are cousins who don't speak to each other although they are constantly together. They are 2 of the more normal people in town.
Then we spend time with Bailey who is trying to figure out what to do with her life and while doing so, she stumbles over some town secrets. What do the secrets have to do with her? Wellll - maybe there's a connection between this town and her dead husband? Maybe that's the reason he left the billions to his brother and sister and not her?
By the time we get to the turning point in the mystery, I needed a damn scorecard to follow the players. Frankly, I didn't care enough to bother to find paper and write down who was married to whom, who was sleeping with whom, who the parents were of various people. It was a case of a group of small town bullies with a secret that they did everything they could to cover up - and succeeded for years. Where Bailey fits into the story is what you learn when you get to the end. (well, she doesn't really fit in - how's that for a spoiler?)
Since it turns out Jimmie knew the secret all along, why didn't he do something about it while he was alive?? Why did he let his brother and sister get away with so much? Were we supposed to believe he was planning on doing it later or something? And the biggest mystery of all is - why did so many people write positive reviews about this??
There is a (mild) love interest in the story - Matt. Well. I dunno. He's just a local guy, related to but unaware of the town's secret. But it really isn't Matt and Bailey's story - it is more a story of the town, as uncovered by Bailey while she tries to get on her feet after being left destitute by her dead billionaire husband. There was very little romance in this book - I'm not even going to tag it romance. One reviewer mentioned that she feels Deveraux is good at writing about women who have come to crossroads in their lives - maybe that's what I missed about this book, it was about a turning point and not about romance at all. There were several turning points - Bailey's, after Jimmie's death; Jimmie's, when he left the small town and became a billionaire - it seemed every character (and there were a bunch of them) had a major crossroad issue.
I didn't hate it and I finished it, so it gets 2 stars.
Sunday, November 23, 2008
An Accidental Woman by Barbara Delinsky *****
This is the sequel to Lake News and it's the story of Poppy Blake, the middle of the 3 Blake sisters we met in that book. They all live in Lake Henry, a small town in New Hampshire.
Delinsky writes in the back of the book that she originally planned to do 4 Lake Henry books, one for each season. But she didn't write more Lake Henry books for several years after Lake News, and then only because of the requests for Poppy's story.
At the end of Lake News, Poppy has finally met in person Griffin Hughes, a journalist who had been calling for news about her sister Lily's debacle (the false rumors of her being a Catholic Cardinal's lover). They struck up a relationship by phone, and Poppy never wanted him to know she was paraplegic. She's actually got a good setup - her home was built specifically for her needs, and she has what seems to be state-of-the-art equipment - wheelchair, car - for getting around. But she's never fully forgiven herself for the role she played in the accident that killed her boyfriend and caused her injuries 12 years earlier. They meet in person at the news conference at the end, and we are left only to imagine that a relationship bloomed between them at that point. An Accidental Woman takes up several weeks later, after John and Lily marry, and Poppy has given Griffin the brush-off.
Griffin Hughes doesn't have much in the way of secrets or disabilities himself, unless you count a sister having run away and never being found some 7 years earlier. He comes from Money and has 4 or 5? brothers, all of them living high-powered lives, but since their sister ran away after a drug scandal, the family hasn't been close. However, he mentioned to his FBI brother that a cold case fugitive photo looked a lot like a woman he met in Lake Henry - and the next thing you know, Heather Malone has been arrested for murder and flight from prosecution.
The FBI is claiming Heather is actually Lisa Matlock, who ran over and killed an influential California politician's son 15 years ago and was never brought to justice. Heather claims she is indeed Heather Malone, but refuses to help the lawyer, Cassie, with any details that might exonerate her. Now in jail in another New Hampshire town awaiting trial, Heather left behind her lover Micah and his 2 young daughters with whom she'd been living for 4 years - well, it was heartbreaking all in all.
And Griffin is responsible for this, he feels, responsible for tearing the town in half - half thinking Heather could never have killed anyone and she wasn't this Lisa, and half thinking nobody really knew Heather or what she was really capable of.
Like Lake News, it's a complicated story with a cast of thousands (well, ok, dozens), all fully fleshed out. I said Lake News wasn't complex or layered - I'm not sure I was using the right adjectives. It's got several storylines going on at once - Poppy coming to terms with her disability; Poppy coming to terms with her mother Maida; Griffin's search for his sister and also his search for redemption for having inadvertently turned Heather in; Heather's story - was she Lisa? - and Micah's story - could he still love Heather if she was Lisa and had never told him the truth? We got a glimpse of Lily and John, and we got a taste of the life of lawyer Cassie and her husband and children. Everyone has a story, all intertwined, and all leading up to whether they could let the past rule their present and their futures.
There was a twist in the book that felt forced and not as natural, almost as if there were no other way to find the child given up for adoption so the author threw in an extra, sort of mysterious character. I'm not sure why that bothered me - it wasn't really that outrageous, it just didn't flow easily from the story in my own mind. It seemed too pat, too coincidental. And where we got justice for the wrongs done to Lily in Lake News, we had to settle for what little justice could be had for Heather when the facts were put on the table. It was a lot messier than Lily's cut-and-dried situation: Lily had not done anything at all wrong, including the affair which did not exist. What Heather had done - what Poppy had done - even what Cassie was doing to her own family, these things were not as simplistic and as easy to resolve. No Die Hard YESSS! moments here.
Still the story was tender and touching and I teared up on more than one occasion, most notably when Micah's younger daughter Star urges him to go see Heather in jail and take her a tuna fish sandwich so maybe Heather would be think of Star when she ate it. It reduced an enormously complicated issue to a very small and simple one: all that really mattered to Star was whether Heather thought about Star, or had left her for good, like Star's mother had done by dying.
There's a notable pet in the blind cat Victoria that Griffin picks up in town and then loses to Poppy, and the maple sap business is given enough copy that you'll be able to open your own someday - but not so much that I felt like I was being lectured to!
I am not as conflicted about the genre on this story - this is really women's fiction. The actual romance between Griffin and Poppy is no more important that the relationship between Micah and Heather, and there are other threads in the story that overwhelm these as well. But still, it was a wonderful, relaxing, satisfying and heart-wrenching read.
5 stars!
Delinsky writes in the back of the book that she originally planned to do 4 Lake Henry books, one for each season. But she didn't write more Lake Henry books for several years after Lake News, and then only because of the requests for Poppy's story.
At the end of Lake News, Poppy has finally met in person Griffin Hughes, a journalist who had been calling for news about her sister Lily's debacle (the false rumors of her being a Catholic Cardinal's lover). They struck up a relationship by phone, and Poppy never wanted him to know she was paraplegic. She's actually got a good setup - her home was built specifically for her needs, and she has what seems to be state-of-the-art equipment - wheelchair, car - for getting around. But she's never fully forgiven herself for the role she played in the accident that killed her boyfriend and caused her injuries 12 years earlier. They meet in person at the news conference at the end, and we are left only to imagine that a relationship bloomed between them at that point. An Accidental Woman takes up several weeks later, after John and Lily marry, and Poppy has given Griffin the brush-off.
Griffin Hughes doesn't have much in the way of secrets or disabilities himself, unless you count a sister having run away and never being found some 7 years earlier. He comes from Money and has 4 or 5? brothers, all of them living high-powered lives, but since their sister ran away after a drug scandal, the family hasn't been close. However, he mentioned to his FBI brother that a cold case fugitive photo looked a lot like a woman he met in Lake Henry - and the next thing you know, Heather Malone has been arrested for murder and flight from prosecution.
The FBI is claiming Heather is actually Lisa Matlock, who ran over and killed an influential California politician's son 15 years ago and was never brought to justice. Heather claims she is indeed Heather Malone, but refuses to help the lawyer, Cassie, with any details that might exonerate her. Now in jail in another New Hampshire town awaiting trial, Heather left behind her lover Micah and his 2 young daughters with whom she'd been living for 4 years - well, it was heartbreaking all in all.
And Griffin is responsible for this, he feels, responsible for tearing the town in half - half thinking Heather could never have killed anyone and she wasn't this Lisa, and half thinking nobody really knew Heather or what she was really capable of.
Like Lake News, it's a complicated story with a cast of thousands (well, ok, dozens), all fully fleshed out. I said Lake News wasn't complex or layered - I'm not sure I was using the right adjectives. It's got several storylines going on at once - Poppy coming to terms with her disability; Poppy coming to terms with her mother Maida; Griffin's search for his sister and also his search for redemption for having inadvertently turned Heather in; Heather's story - was she Lisa? - and Micah's story - could he still love Heather if she was Lisa and had never told him the truth? We got a glimpse of Lily and John, and we got a taste of the life of lawyer Cassie and her husband and children. Everyone has a story, all intertwined, and all leading up to whether they could let the past rule their present and their futures.
There was a twist in the book that felt forced and not as natural, almost as if there were no other way to find the child given up for adoption so the author threw in an extra, sort of mysterious character. I'm not sure why that bothered me - it wasn't really that outrageous, it just didn't flow easily from the story in my own mind. It seemed too pat, too coincidental. And where we got justice for the wrongs done to Lily in Lake News, we had to settle for what little justice could be had for Heather when the facts were put on the table. It was a lot messier than Lily's cut-and-dried situation: Lily had not done anything at all wrong, including the affair which did not exist. What Heather had done - what Poppy had done - even what Cassie was doing to her own family, these things were not as simplistic and as easy to resolve. No Die Hard YESSS! moments here.
Still the story was tender and touching and I teared up on more than one occasion, most notably when Micah's younger daughter Star urges him to go see Heather in jail and take her a tuna fish sandwich so maybe Heather would be think of Star when she ate it. It reduced an enormously complicated issue to a very small and simple one: all that really mattered to Star was whether Heather thought about Star, or had left her for good, like Star's mother had done by dying.
There's a notable pet in the blind cat Victoria that Griffin picks up in town and then loses to Poppy, and the maple sap business is given enough copy that you'll be able to open your own someday - but not so much that I felt like I was being lectured to!
I am not as conflicted about the genre on this story - this is really women's fiction. The actual romance between Griffin and Poppy is no more important that the relationship between Micah and Heather, and there are other threads in the story that overwhelm these as well. But still, it was a wonderful, relaxing, satisfying and heart-wrenching read.
5 stars!
Saturday, November 22, 2008
Lake News by Barbara Delinsky *****
This is a new-to-me author whose name I've seen listed in lots of PBS bookshelves but not discussed much in the forums I frequent or the blogs I read. A friend in the area loaned me this and the sequel, An Accidental Woman, to read, and I bought a slew of her books at the local library sale as well.
It seems Delinsky straddles the Women's Fiction/Romance genre borders, from what I can tell. Her book affected me like the Robyn Carr book, Virgin River, I read recently - I truly loved it. I found the writing warm, and lush - not complex or layered as much as detailed and thorough. Well, I'm not much of an author myself, so maybe I'm not describing it right. There were some suspenseful moments, and some tender, heart-breaking moments, and I felt those. I felt Lily's fear as she battled the newspaper reporters after being accused of having an affair with a Catholic priest, and I felt John's grief as he watched his father - as he wrestled with the feelings of inadequacy and longing for approval. She made me feel - and that's my first requirement of a good story.
Both Lake News and Virgin River also made me long for a small town to go home to, a community of people who know me and accept me for what I am and defend me. That's actually laughable since I grew up in a small town and frankly don't have any yearning to ever return there. I don't find the reality of small town living anywhere near the romance of it in fiction. (I don't count my current rural living as really small-town because I consider "small town" as more like 1000-5000 people, with the accompanying accoutrements, and I'm rural, as in, pack a lunch to go into town rural.)
The Blake family of Lake Henry, New Hampshire, has run the apple orchard and cider business for generations. Currently Maida Blake is in charge, since George died some years back. Maida's daughters Poppy and Rose live in town. Poppy's paraplegic, and lives in a cottage on Maida's property, and Rose is married and lives in town. Rose and Maida don't approve of the oldest Blake sister's life: Lily Blake is a nightclub singer and music teacher in Boston.
Lily left Lake Henry after a teenaged scrape that gave her a (sealed) juvenile record: a boyfriend, Donny Kipling, stole a car and took her riding in it. She didn't know it was stolen, but he claimed she did so his jail sentence would be reduced. Now living a relatively quiet life in Boston, she counts among her friends and associates Father Francis Rosetti, who has just been elevated to Cardinal. A Boston reporter decides there's more than friendship, and cons Lily into making some statements that, taken out of context, set her up as the Cardinal's lover - and the story breaks on page one of major newspapers all across the country.
John Kipling is Donny's older brother. He also left Lake Henry at a young age - but he's about 8 or so years older than Lily, so he didn't really know her then. He's become an accomplished journalist, but 3 years before his father had a heart attack, and John decided to move back to Lake Henry to watch over his dad, and run the local weekly newspaper, the Lake News. Donny died years ago, and their mother left their father a long time before that, so John is Gus's only relative. Not that Gus has ever respected him, or forgiven him for leaving, or anything. Gus is a crusty old bastard, and John grits his teeth and goes forward, trying still to win his approval after all these years. When John gets a call from his long-time nemesis, the crooked journalist who broke the Lily/Cardinal rumors/story, he develops an interest in the story.
The book chronicles, in rich details, what Lily goes through - losing her two jobs in Boston, her flight to NH to hide and her slowly developing relationship with John. John is hoping to get a book deal out of Lily's true story of injustice, and he's got a publisher chomping at the bit for it - but his sense of honor won't allow him to use the underhanded techniques his colleagues used to break the story. He works away at Lily slowly - and slowly finds himself head over heels in love with this shy singer with a stutter.
Reading the book felt like swaying in a hammock, comforting and comfortable, and the ending was satisfying and smile-inducing. In fact, on one level, it almost had the same effect that watching Die Hard movies has on me: wanting to jump up and shout YESSS! when the bad guys get it and the good guys come out on top. Except not in a shouting way, but just a smile and a nod of the head. Same emotion, different level, is all.
Now - why is it more women's fiction than romance? Well, the emphasis of the tome is more on their lives and their families and neighbors and how they intertwine than the actual romantic relationship between Lily and John, but it's a tiny, narrow line between the 2 genres and could be either, really. There are also the undercurrents of the relationships between father and son, and between mother and daughter - the latter shown between Maida and Lily, and echoed in Rose and her daughter Hannah, but these don't necessarily make it not a romance. In a Harlequin/Blaze I have on audio, Hot for Him by Sarah Mayberry, the relationship between the heroine and her mother is an important element and the book is still romance.
Anyway, it's a 5 star read, and I'm already several pages into the sequel.
It seems Delinsky straddles the Women's Fiction/Romance genre borders, from what I can tell. Her book affected me like the Robyn Carr book, Virgin River, I read recently - I truly loved it. I found the writing warm, and lush - not complex or layered as much as detailed and thorough. Well, I'm not much of an author myself, so maybe I'm not describing it right. There were some suspenseful moments, and some tender, heart-breaking moments, and I felt those. I felt Lily's fear as she battled the newspaper reporters after being accused of having an affair with a Catholic priest, and I felt John's grief as he watched his father - as he wrestled with the feelings of inadequacy and longing for approval. She made me feel - and that's my first requirement of a good story.
Both Lake News and Virgin River also made me long for a small town to go home to, a community of people who know me and accept me for what I am and defend me. That's actually laughable since I grew up in a small town and frankly don't have any yearning to ever return there. I don't find the reality of small town living anywhere near the romance of it in fiction. (I don't count my current rural living as really small-town because I consider "small town" as more like 1000-5000 people, with the accompanying accoutrements, and I'm rural, as in, pack a lunch to go into town rural.)
The Blake family of Lake Henry, New Hampshire, has run the apple orchard and cider business for generations. Currently Maida Blake is in charge, since George died some years back. Maida's daughters Poppy and Rose live in town. Poppy's paraplegic, and lives in a cottage on Maida's property, and Rose is married and lives in town. Rose and Maida don't approve of the oldest Blake sister's life: Lily Blake is a nightclub singer and music teacher in Boston.
Lily left Lake Henry after a teenaged scrape that gave her a (sealed) juvenile record: a boyfriend, Donny Kipling, stole a car and took her riding in it. She didn't know it was stolen, but he claimed she did so his jail sentence would be reduced. Now living a relatively quiet life in Boston, she counts among her friends and associates Father Francis Rosetti, who has just been elevated to Cardinal. A Boston reporter decides there's more than friendship, and cons Lily into making some statements that, taken out of context, set her up as the Cardinal's lover - and the story breaks on page one of major newspapers all across the country.
John Kipling is Donny's older brother. He also left Lake Henry at a young age - but he's about 8 or so years older than Lily, so he didn't really know her then. He's become an accomplished journalist, but 3 years before his father had a heart attack, and John decided to move back to Lake Henry to watch over his dad, and run the local weekly newspaper, the Lake News. Donny died years ago, and their mother left their father a long time before that, so John is Gus's only relative. Not that Gus has ever respected him, or forgiven him for leaving, or anything. Gus is a crusty old bastard, and John grits his teeth and goes forward, trying still to win his approval after all these years. When John gets a call from his long-time nemesis, the crooked journalist who broke the Lily/Cardinal rumors/story, he develops an interest in the story.
The book chronicles, in rich details, what Lily goes through - losing her two jobs in Boston, her flight to NH to hide and her slowly developing relationship with John. John is hoping to get a book deal out of Lily's true story of injustice, and he's got a publisher chomping at the bit for it - but his sense of honor won't allow him to use the underhanded techniques his colleagues used to break the story. He works away at Lily slowly - and slowly finds himself head over heels in love with this shy singer with a stutter.
Reading the book felt like swaying in a hammock, comforting and comfortable, and the ending was satisfying and smile-inducing. In fact, on one level, it almost had the same effect that watching Die Hard movies has on me: wanting to jump up and shout YESSS! when the bad guys get it and the good guys come out on top. Except not in a shouting way, but just a smile and a nod of the head. Same emotion, different level, is all.
Now - why is it more women's fiction than romance? Well, the emphasis of the tome is more on their lives and their families and neighbors and how they intertwine than the actual romantic relationship between Lily and John, but it's a tiny, narrow line between the 2 genres and could be either, really. There are also the undercurrents of the relationships between father and son, and between mother and daughter - the latter shown between Maida and Lily, and echoed in Rose and her daughter Hannah, but these don't necessarily make it not a romance. In a Harlequin/Blaze I have on audio, Hot for Him by Sarah Mayberry, the relationship between the heroine and her mother is an important element and the book is still romance.
Anyway, it's a 5 star read, and I'm already several pages into the sequel.
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