With characters you care for, a smooth, engaging plot and an interesting reflection on values and success, romance/women’s...
Sonnet Romano has spent her adult years working hard to make a name for herself out in the real world, far away from her idyllic hometown, Willow Lake. But when life takes some unexpected turns, she may just realize that everything she’s been looking for is right back where she started.
Sonnet has checked off most of the big boxes on her "must-do-before-age-thirty" list, and she’s over-the-moon about her life in Manhattan, her job with UNESCO and the opportunities on the horizon from winning a prestigious international program fellowship. But everything comes to a screeching halt when she learns her newly married mother—who had Sonnet as a teenager and raised her as a single mom—is pregnant and sick. Forsaking the fellowship, Sonnet moves back to Willow Lake to be with her mother, risking disapproval from her father, who’s running for the U.S. Senate, and her fledgling boyfriend, who’s working on her father’s campaign. She accepts a job on a reality show being shot in the town, featuring an infamous female rapper and bunch of inner-city kids, and learns that her estranged best friend has been hired as the lead cameraman. Sonnet and Zach have been friends forever, but he is part of her past, and they are on different paths in life. Despite a sizzling newfound attraction between them, she wants her mom to get well, the baby to be born and the show to be wrapped, so she can get back to the city and her own fast track to the successful, prestigious future she’s always worked toward. But slowing down has a funny way of forcing Sonnet to take stock, and maybe her idea of a perfect life will alter with a little help from the old and new important people in her life and the picture-perfect town she grew up in.
With characters you care for, a smooth, engaging plot and an interesting reflection on values and success, romance/women’s fiction favorite Wiggs sends up another charming winner in the Lakeshore Chronicles series.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-7783-1384-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harlequin MIRA
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2012
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A pleasant read with no major surprises, the novel profits from the author’s skill at illuminating the most profound (and...
An unexpected patrimony leads a young woman to love and family in this first installment of a new series by the beloved Regency romance author.
An orphanage in Bath has been Anna Snow's home since she was left there as a toddler by a shadowy figure. She is largely content with living and working there as a schoolteacher now, partly supported by an unknown benefactor’s stipend. Like her fellow orphans, though, she has always weaved stories of her origins, and the best one—wealth and status—suddenly comes true when she finds out that she is the daughter of the recently deceased Earl of Riverdale, born during a secret early marriage. Yet Anna, who learns that her name is Anastasia Westcott, longs most for familial affection, which seems impossible to gain from her newly discovered half siblings, who have been suddenly disinherited. Balogh (Unforgiven, 2016, etc.) specializes in romance novels that both accept the essential solitude of the human condition and offer love as a stalwart companion; here, Anna has Avery Archer, the Duke of Netherby, to help her in this balancing act. Netherby is an unusual romance hero in that he is a man of beauty with a physical stature that evokes Asian martial artists rather than the anachronistically muscled men often found in the subgenre. Anna is initially wary of his aura of refined nonchalance but finds him to be a true friend as she struggles to learn her aristocratic duties and searches for allies in her new role. Netherby is taken aback by his own attraction to the woman he had pegged as a rube but whose simplicity and dignity slowly amplify her loveliness in his eyes.
A pleasant read with no major surprises, the novel profits from the author’s skill at illuminating the most profound (and burdensome) of human desires—to love and be loved.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-47779-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Signet
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2016
McFarlane has created a very funny, very romantic story with deep emotional impact.
A jilted British attorney gets more than she bargained for when she agrees to a fauxmance with the office playboy.
Laurie Watkinson has a corporate law job she loves, dear friends, and Dan, her dependable live-in boyfriend who works in the same firm. When Dan sits her down one evening, Laurie expects anything but to hear him say he's moving out; and then to hear soon after that he has a new girlfriend. Hoping for a bit of revenge, newly single Laurie agrees to pose as “Phony Goddess” to “Greek God” Jamie Carter, her new colleague and a known “soulless womanizer.” Jamie is gorgeous and charming but needs to appear settled to secure a promotion, and he thinks earning the affection of Laurie, the firm’s “golden girl,” is the surest route. Jamie and Laurie are attracted to one another, make each other laugh, and, they learn, have childhood trauma in common. Jamie is a classic playboy felled by love who’s written endearingly and convincingly: “I scoffed at the idea anyone could make you see your life through new eyes and I’m so, so glad to be wrong.” Laurie’s intelligence and acerbic wit—especially as they relate to navigating English society as a woman of color—are strengths that can obscure uncomfortable feelings. Thanks to a selfish, absentee father, an unconventional mother, and, she now realizes, a partner who never encouraged her to grow as a person, Laurie puts her own desires last. Giving the novel an expanded palette beyond the romance, Laurie’s friendship with Jamie is just one of several changes in behavior and attitude that help her to regain a sense of her own agency and importance. McFarlane’s gift is writing romantic comedy that depicts a recognizable world—in this case, the culturally diverse world of young professionals in Manchester, England—without dimming the luster of shining moments of humor, love, and connection.
McFarlane has created a very funny, very romantic story with deep emotional impact.Pub Date: March 24, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-295850-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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