Tuesday Review: Adventures in Parenthood

Adventures in Parenthood

By Dawn Atkins

Publisher: Harlequin 

(Superromance)

Release Date: 

November 1, 2013

Dixon Carter has depended on his older brother Howard as a constant, unchanging presence in his life. Even his place of employment, Bootstrap Academy, is the dream of Howard, who worked as a social worker for seventeen years before he and his schoolteacher wife, Brianna, started the job-training and placement agency to help workers in Phoenix displaced in a faltering economy. Dixon is left in charge of his twin nieces when Howard and Brianna take a rare vacation to celebrate their fifth wedding anniversary, the first time they have ever left their four-year-old daughters. Dixon is blindsided by the news that Howard and Brianna have been killed in an automobile accident as they were returning to Phoenix. Devastated by his own grief, he is also overwhelmed with the realization that he has suddenly become responsible for his nieces.

Aubrey Hanson can hardly contain her excitement about a potential sponsor that will allow her to continue her blog—Extreme Adventure Girl: Ordinary Girl on an Extraordinary Journey. Having just returned from reindeer racing in Norway, she resents every mile between L.A. and Phoenix that delays her sharing the news with her twin Brianna, the person who has shared all the important moments of her life. Aubrey’s good news would add another celebratory note to the celebration of Briana and Howard’s anniversary. Nothing could have prepared Aubrey for the news that awaits her when she arrives in Phoenix. Brianna and Howard are dead, and Ginger and Sienna are orphans. Instead of attending an anniversary party, Aubrey must help plan a funeral.

Both Dixon and Aubrey have lost the person dearest to them, and both are eager to assume the care of their young nieces.  But neither of them has any real understanding of all that parenting two little girls whose lives and hearts have been delivered a knockout blow. Despite Aubrey’s good intentions, she reluctantly admits that the lifestyle of constant travel and risk-taking imposed by her adventurous life makes her a poor candidate to be the girls’ primary guardian. Dixon, in contrast, is based in Phoenix, the girls’ home, with a stable routine. Moreover, he has been a regular part of their young lives, and their emotional attachment to him is strong. Clearly, it is in the best interest of the children that they remain in his care.

The two agree that Dixon will serve as guardian, but Aubrey will be involved in the girls’ life as much as possible. However, it’s not as simple as it sounds. First, the situation is complicated by Dixon and Aubrey’s history. They came within a heartbeat of having a fling at Howard and Brianna’s wedding, but Dixon’s native caution prevailed at the last minute. The chemistry between them remains potent, but given the differences in their lifestyles and personalities, avoiding temptation seems their wisest choice. And if their feelings don’t complicate matters enough, the disagreements over what risk-taker Audrey and risk-avoider Dixon think are best for Ginger and Sienna are vast. Are they too great to overcome when the happiness of four people is at stake?

Atkins provides a realistic view of grief and the difficulties of rebuilding lives after traumatic loss. Both Dixon and Aubrey are complex characters with personal histories that make it easy to understand why they have become the particular people they are. I also appreciated that after their almost-fling, they both went on with their lives. Both have been seriously involved with other people in the interim, and the fallout from those failed relationships adds to their wariness with one another. Ginger and Sienna are credibly portrayed in their reactions to their parents’ deaths and to the changes in their lives. Not only does Atkins avoid making them cardboard kids, but she also avoids making the twins carbon copies of each other. All of these characters change during the course of the story. Atkins does an admirable job of showing the difficulties of getting on with life after great loss while giving readers a solid romance at the same time. If you think category romance can’t be satisfying and substantive, you should give Adventures in Parenthood a try.

As an aunt and great-aunt whose nephews and nieces are important in my life, I like stories that show aunts and uncles playing significant parts. Most readers remember Auntie Mame, of course, but aside from her, who is your favorite fictional aunt or uncle.

Tuesday Review: Not Another Wedding

Not Another Wedding

By Jennifer McKenzie

Publisher: Harlequin (Superromance)

Release Date: October 1, 2013

Poppy Sullivan made a rare choice to leave her partner in charge of an event their Vancouver events planning company was responsible for in order to head to her hometown, Naramata, BC, ostensibly to attend the wedding of one of oldest friends. In reality, Poppy hopes to stop the wedding. She’s no anti-Cupid. Even though her own love life is nonexistent at the moment, her parents were high school sweethearts who settled into a happy marriage in the town where they grew up, a pattern her sister and brother-in-law repeated. But Jamie Cartwright has known his bride only two months, and Poppy doesn’t believe a relationship of such short duration is a sound base for a happy marriage. She hopes that if she can just talk to Jamie alone, she can persuade him to stop and think before he jumps into matrimony.

Beck Lefebvre allowed himself to be guilted into serving as his cousin Jamie’s best man, but he’s not happy about it. Not only does he find it difficult to take time away from the family business just as negotiations for the company’s sixth hotel are ongoing, but Beck is skeptical about love, marriage, and happily-ever-afters. His attitude is hardly surprising given the example of his much-married parents, who, to Beck’s dismay, seem to be headed toward their third attempt at being married to each other. Making matters more complicated is his mother’s plan to match him with the younger sister of the bride. The only bright spot in Beck’s situation is his auburn-haired high school girlfriend whom he hasn’t seen in a dozen years.

Poppy can’t believe Beck is flirting with her. She wants nothing to do with this man, a prime example of the one who never called. He apologizes nicely, but a mere apology is not enough to make her forgive the man who disappeared without a word the day after he became her first lover—not even if he is even hotter now than he was then. But when Poppy finds it impossible to catch Jamie alone for a serious conversation, Beck proposes a deal she can’t turn down: he will see that she gets time with Jamie if Poppy will be Beck’s date for the wedding events and save him from his mother’s matchmaking. Soon Beck and Poppy are falling heart over head. Sometimes life offers a second chance at love when you least expect it.

Not Another Wedding combines humor, family dynamics, and some sizzling chemistry into this story about a hero and heroine who are not looking for love when it finds them. I have a soft spot for reunion stories, and this one was a bit different. Poppy and Beck are credible as young, contemporary professionals. Their families provide context and contrast as well with Poppy’s happily married parents with stable lives rooted in Naramata, and Beck’s parents with their varied, troubles past. All of these details make the story more interesting.

I did find Poppy’s determination to interfere in her friend Jamie’s life difficult to understand. But perhaps this is a generational difference since it is a plot point I have observed in a number of contemporary romances over the past year or two. Nevertheless, if you are looking for a quick, fun, easy read, this one is worth checking out.

Would you try to stop a friend’s wedding if you thought the friend was making a mistake?

Note: I responded to Jane’s comment yesterday with an acknowledgement that I remember reading a Superromance with a Canadian setting. Not Another Wedding is actually the second of Jennifer McKenzie books I’ve read, both set in Canada.  That Weekend (January 2013) is the other.

Tuesday Review: Love in Plain Sight

Love in Plain Sight

By Jeanie London

Publisher: Harlequin (Superromance)

Release Date: September 3, 2013

Courtney Gerard, sister of Mac Gerard (With This Fling, Harlequin Blaze, 2004), may have grown up a child of privilege, but that doesn’t mean that she has not committed her heart as well as her considerable intelligence and energy to doing her best in her position as a caseworker for the New Orleans Department of Children and Family Services. She is shocked and troubled when a classroom fight uncovers a major error in a file she inherited from a deceased co-worker. The teenager on the department’s records as Araceli Ruiz-Ortiz is someone else. Somehow in the chaos after Katrina, a mistake was made, and it is only been discovered eight years later. No one knows what happened to the real Araceli. While the case is being investigated, Courtney is placed on administrative leave.

Marc DiLeo, younger brother of Dominic DiLeo (Then There Were Three, Harlequin Superromance, 2011), was a bounty hunter bringing in big bucks tracking down wealthy “skips” until an accident left him with a shattered leg and a no choice but to take a break from his job with its physical demands. At the insistence of his loving family, he left Colorado Springs and is back home in New Orleans, caught in a cycle of physical therapy, pain pills, and corroding self-pity. His wise mother thinks he needs something to focus on instead of his own recovery. When Courtney, impatient with the pace of the government investigation and concerned about the missing girl and about the fact that her professional reputation along with those of her supervisor and her dead co-worker are at risk, asks Mama DiLeo if Marc can advise her on how to investigate the case, Mama decides Marc himself should take the job.

Marc refuses, but when all the DiLeo weigh in to persuade him, he decides anything is better than dealing with his family. Since he can’t drive, Courtney is drafted as his chauffeur and assistant. Soon the two of them are chasing leads in an all out effort to find Araceli. The more time they spend together, the more the attraction between them grows. But they are both wary of involvement, and they are both heart deep in their search for the missing girl, who becomes more real to them with every detail they uncover. Will they find Araceli, and will they allow themselves to accept the love that can give them the HEA they never expected to find?

The second of Jeanie London’s DiLeo Family books blends romance and mystery in a story with rich contexts and strong emotional appeal. The details of Araceli’s life and of the chaos confronting the New Orleans Department when their paper records were destroyed by Katrina and the nightmare of tracking the 2000 children who were evacuated from the city grounds Love in Plain Sight in compelling reality. Because London weaves first-person chapters in Araceli’s voice into the novel, the reader cares about her happiness as an individual rather than as a statistic from the early chapters of the book. Since both the Gerard and DiLeo families are introduced in earlier books, London’s fans have expanded contexts for both hero and heroine.

Courtney is a sympathetic character from the beginning, given her genuine concern for her clients and her colleagues, but Marc is a harder sell. A bounty hunter’s job does not immediately evoke sympathy, and frankly Marc comes across as a jerk who fails to appreciate his having survived a near-fatal accident and the love and support of his lively family. He is also deliberately rude to Courtney. But Harley Prince Gerard, Courtney’s sister-in-law and Marc’s practically-a-sister, assures Courtney that Marc is a jerk with a marshmallow center, and as the reader, along with Courtney, begins to see the softness he struggles to hide, Marc becomes more sympathetic. Long before the end, I was rooting for their HEA.

If you like your romances with a touch of realism, a helping of mystery, and a romance with plenty of sizzle and credible complications, I think you will like Love in Plain Sight. I love the DiLeo family, and since there are still unmarried brothers, I hope we see more of them in future books.



I’ve been a fan of family series since I read my first Nora Roberts book, one of her MacGregor family tales, back in 1985. I never tire of them and have a hard time choosing a favorite from among my many keepers. What’s your favorite family series?

Saturday Review: Staying at Joe's

Staying at Joe’s

By Kathy Altman

Publisher: Harlequin (Superromance)

Release Date: August 6, 2013

Allison Kinkaid is in Castle Creek, Pennsylvania, only under duress, and she can’t wait to take care of business and get back to Virginia, where she belongs. Her boss in Tackett & Pike, the Washington, D. C. area PR firm where she works has charged her with convincing her former colleague and former lover Joe Gallahan to return to the company because a major client is refusing to sign unless Joe is given his account. Allison knows this may be the toughest pitch she’s ever made since she and Joe parted ways with each convinced the other was guilty of betrayal, but failure is not an option since Allison’s job and everything that depends on it are on the line.

Joe Gallahan has no regrets about leaving the D. C. firm where he garnered an impressive reputation and hefty salary but lost sight of the things that were most important. It may be too late to fulfill the dream he had shared with his brother, but Joe is renovating more than old buildings as he reclaims and restores an abandoned motel. Leaving wasn’t his choice, but going back is. Everything in him rejects Allie’s proposal that he return to his old life, but it’s not so easy to forget what the two of them were together. His motives for countering Allie’s offer of a $10,000 bonus for two months at T & P with his own proposal that she give him two weeks of hard labor on his motel restoration for his giving four weeks to the firm are mixed. He doesn’t think for a moment that city-girl Allie will last two weeks in Castle Creek, and he’s not willing to consider why he wants her there.

Allie rejects Joe’s proposal outright, but her boss refuses to let her rejection stand.  His instructions are for her to do whatever is necessary to bring Gallahan back to save a multimillion-dollar account or consider her own job terminated. A lot can happen in two weeks: lives can change, and hearts can break—or heal. Allie and Joe are about to discover what two weeks will mean to them.

 This book is connected to Altman’s debut novel, The Other Soldier. It shares not only a setting and some characters with the earlier book but also a rare combination of high-tension conflict and genuine humor rooted in situation and characters. Allie and Joe are both damaged people with real problems that are too serious to be resolved with an I-love-you and heated encounters in bed. The passion between the two has not been weakened by almost a year apart, but it soon becomes evident to the reader and eventually to these characters however hot the fire between them raged during their three months together, they never let down the barriers and allowed themselves to be known. Allie knows Joe has a problem with alcohol, but she knows nothing of the demons in his past nor of the guilt that torments him after the devastating loss of his brother. Joe knows Allie feels responsible for her gambling-addicted mother, but he has no idea of what drives her loyalty or the extremes forms that loyalty has taken.

Given the darkness and the demons, one would expect Staying at Joe’s to be an angsty, heart-twisting read, and there are certainly moments when that description fits. But this is also a book that features a quirky community with a delightful cast of characters ranging from a kid and a kitten to busy, bossy, big-hearted senior citizens. I loved seeing Allie and Joe reach their HEA, all the more because sometimes I wondered if they could. I was left with a satisfied sigh at the ending and a desire to return to Castle Creek to see Parker and Nat reunited with Reid and to see Marcus get his HEA.

I must add that as much as I liked the book, I was bothered by the simplistic equating of small town with healthy, wholesome values and supportive community and big city with materialism, greed, and dog-eat-dog mentality. I’d like to see characters decide they belong in a small town without writing off city life as the choice of the unredeemed. Still, this concern didn’t stop me from adding Castle Creek to my list of terrific small towns and Kathy Altman to my list of authors to keep an eye on for upcoming releases.

The popularity of small-town romances seems to have passed the trend stage and settled into an established sub-genre. Why do you think small-town settings are so appealing? Have you reached the point where you would like to see big-city settings get more attention?

A Baker's Dozen of Reviews: Day Thirteen--His Uptown Girl

His Uptown Girl

By Liz Talley

Publisher: 

Harlequin Superromance

Release Date: June 4, 2013

Eleanor Theriot, owner of the Queen’s Box, an antiques shop, in New Orleans, has spent much of her life trying to be what other people expected her to be. Five years after she was widowed when her husband was murdered by his mistress, Eleanor is ready not just to get on with her life but to create a different, freer life, one that allows her to be who she is—just as soon as she discovers who that is. With forty just around the corner, she needs to begin the journey, and the hot, multiracial pianist Dez Batiste who can increase her heart rate with a look may be just the companion she needs.

Once a jazz pianist and composer on the cusp of fame, Dez Batiste has lost his music since Katrina. After trying and failing at a “normal” life, he has returned to New Orleans to open an upscale jazz club. The owners of businesses surrounding the site he has chosen aren’t sure a jazz club like the Blue Rondo is a good fit for their family-friendly neighborhood. Dez needs to convince them they are wrong, but he’d like to convince elegant Eleanor Theriot, president of the Magazine Street Merchants Association of much more. All the signs tell him she is interested if only she can move past her hang-ups over her being nearly nine years older than he and their vastly different lifestyles.

With a mix of eagerness and trepidation, and over the objections of her college-freshman daughter, her conservative parents, and her snobby bitch former mother-in-law, Eleanor welcomes Dez into her bed and into her life. Their mutually exclusive friends with benefits relationship is soon complicated by feelings they are both reluctant to put a name to. Relationships are not static, and Eleanor will have to decide whether the love she can have with Dez really can cast out her fears.

Liz Talley gives readers a look at post-Katrina New Orleans and the cultural mix of that colorful city. In addition to the complicated and sizzling romance between Eleanor and Dez, secondary threads point to the sharp contrast between the city’s privileged young whose greatest concern is owning another designer bag and the kids who grow up amid poverty and violence struggling to survive and dreaming of escape. The issues are large ones, perhaps too large for a romance with a word limit, but it’s exciting to see an author pushing boundaries. I might have wished for more depth at times, but I always found these characters and their story fully engaging. Talley goes back to New Orleans with her October 2013 Harlequin Superromance, His Brown-Eyed Girl. It’s on my TBR list.

Talley adds religion and politics to the ingredients that make up His Uptown Girl, topics some consider have no place in romance? Where do you stand on this issue?

The Winner Is . . .

The winner of her choice of a 

January Harlequin Superromance is

regencygirl01.

Congratulations!

Please email me at jangarho at gmail dot com with your contact info and your choice of book.

Tomorrow at noon (ET)  I'll post my list of the books I am anticipating for January-June 2013. Please stop by and let us know the books you are most eagerly anticipating.

More Supers: Three Short Reviews

  



Back to the Good Fortune Dinner
By Vicki Essex

Publisher: Harlequin (Superromance)

Release Date: January 2, 2013

Growing up, Tiffany Cheung couldn’t wait to leave the small town where she always felt like a misfit. Now, having lost her job as a junior assistant in a New York publishing house and having been evicted from her apartment, she is forced to return to Everville, New York, to her parents’ home, constant comparisons to her brother, and pressure to work at the Good Fortune Diner, the family’s Chinese restaurant. Tiffany is determined to find another job in the city, but for the present she has no money, no car, and a hefty credit card bill plus major body repairs for her wrecked car. The last thing she wants is for her parents to bail her out, a move that could guilt her into working at the diner. When her high school crush asks her to tutor his son for the summer, Tiffany can’t turn down the money or the chance to see more of Chris Jamieson, who is even hotter now than he was in high school.

Tiffany Cheung’s tutoring helped Chris Jamieson earn a college scholarship, but when his girlfriend became pregnant, he left school to marry her and to work on the family farm. Now he’s the divorced father of a teenage son with a snarl, an attitude, and failing grades in English. His problems are compounded by his father whose ideas about farming and about people are stuck in the previous century. Chris hopes history will repeat itself when Tiffany tutors his son, but he’s ready to write a new story with the new and improved version of his former tutor. But with generational clashes, cultural clashes, and other misunderstandings, Chris and Tiffany have a lot to overcome before they head for their HEA.

Romances that cross cultural barriers are rare, and Back to the Good Fortune Diner does an exceptional job of showing the hybridity of second/third generation immigrants and the prejudices that are still alive and flourishing in pockets of American culture on both sides of cultural divisions. Tiffany is not always a likeable character, but she is interesting and realistic. The relationship between her and Chris develops in a realistic fashion as well. The secondary plot of Daniel, Tiffany’s brother, adds further interest. I recommend this one with a couple of caveats. Some readers may feel that Tiffany surrenders too much of what she wants to get her HEA, and, given the characterization of the parents of both hero and heroine, readers over fifty may feel that mature adults are unfairly portrayed as bigots unable and unwilling to deal with change.

The Truth about Comfort Cove
By Tara Taylor Quinn

Publisher: Harlequin (Superromance)

Release Date: January 2, 2013

This is the third book in Quinn’s It Happened in Comfort Cove series, following A Son’s Tale and A Daughter’s Story. The abduction of two-year-old Claire Sanderson twenty-five years earlier is the case that links the three books. In The Truth about Comfort Creek, two cold case detectives, Lucy Hayes of Aurora, Indiana, and Ramsey Miller of Comfort Creek, Massachusetts, continue to work together to give Emma Sanderson the answers she needs about her little sister’s disappearance.

Lucy and Ramsey have a lot in common, and not all their common ground is professional. Lucy is fighting to keep her emotionally fragile, alcoholic mother sober and strong enough to testify in the trial of the man who raped her and abducted her six-month-old daughter twenty-eight years ago, before Lucy was born. That loss has shaped Lucy’s life as much as it has her mother’s. Totally committed to her job, Lucy maintains a reserve in her private life that keeps everyone at a distance.

Ramsey too knows what it means to lose a sister and watch a mother disintegrate from grief. His sister Diane died as a teenager, and Ramsey holds himself responsible for her death. Knowing that his mother holds him responsible as well, he left Vienna, Kentucky, where he grew up as soon as he could, and he rarely returns, not even to visit his parents on holidays. Instead, he immerses himself in his work, focusing particularly on child abduction cases. His job is his life.

Drawn together by the Sanderson case, the two become friends. They talk on the telephone almost nightly, sharing information about their cases, helping one another when possible, and continuing to spend hours of their own time searching for clues in the Sanderson case. They even fly halfway across the country to be there for one another at crucial moments. Before either of them realizes what’s happening, they come to depend on those phone calls. Their friendship deepens, their physical awareness of one another intensifies, and soon two people who never allowed themselves to think about a relationship are involved in one that is becoming more and more important to them. When the Sanderson case is unexpectedly solved in a way that smashes all their theories about what happened to Claire, their feelings for one another become their only certainty.

The Truth about Comfort Cove is a compelling romantic suspense tale with a resolution that few readers will suspect. Although this is the culmination of a mystery that runs through three books, sufficient background is provided so that this final book can be read as a standalone. The romance and the suspense elements are skillfully woven together. Even the shattering solution plays an essential role in the relationship between Lucy and Ramsey. Seeing these two wounded hearts find their HEA is immensely satisfying.

That Weekend

By Jennifer McKenzie

Publisher: Harlequin (Superromance)

Release Date: January 2, 2013

Ava Christensen, a TV blogger and celebrity reporter, thinks that she has earned the newly available job as co-host of an entertainment news program, but her executive producer, Jake Durham, has a different opinion. He gives the position to a younger, less experienced male colleague with connections. Ava is furious, and being forced to spend a week with Jake at a film festival soon afterwards adds fuel to her fury. But when she slips on an icy street and breaks her wrist, Ava discovers how caring and comforting Jake can be. The two agree they should behave professionally and ignore the simmering attraction between them, but good intentions melt under the force of a chemistry that proves irresistible. But Jake’s carrying a lot of baggage from his past that he has to let go of if he and Ava are to have a future together.

This story was well written, and the entertainment context and the inclusion of bits of Ava’s blog, it has the feel of being truly contemporary. There’s one amusing scene when Ava is in the hospital that has her texting with her best friend about Jake while she and Jake exchange emails about her body language response to the texting.  But I just never felt fully engaged with these characters. Perhaps I’m just not part of the targeted audience for this one, or perhaps it suffered from the inevitable comparisons to other, less conventional and predictable books that are part of January’s Superromance offerings.

One of the things that impressed me about this group of romances was how many of them in some way moved beyond the conventions of romance in some way. Do you prefer your romances conventional or unconventional?

On Friday, one randomly selected commenter will win her/his choice of one of the HSRs I have reviewed this week. (With apologies to international readers, this contest is open to U. S. residents only.)

The Other Side of Us

The Other Side of Us

By Sarah Mayberry

Publisher: Harlequin (Superromance)

Release Date: January 2, 2013

Musician and sound engineer Oliver Barrett considers himself a happily married man until one day he swaps cars with his wife and discovers that she is involved in an affair with an old boyfriend and has been since six months after she and Oliver married six years ago. Reeling from the mix of anger, grief, and humiliation resulting from the breakup of his marriage, Oliver distances himself physically from his problems by leaving Sydney for the beach house a thousand miles away that he and his older brother have inherited from an aunt. He hopes the time he plans to spend getting the house ready to sell will give him some much needed emotional distance from the events that changed his life.

Mackenzie Williams is a television producer recovering from an automobile accident that almost claimed her life. Mackenzie has retreated to her beach house, next door to the house of Oliver’s aunt, where she is going through the long and painful rehabilitation required by the multiple injuries she sustained. She pushes her body to its limits and sometimes beyond, determined to reach the point where she is able to return to the job that has become her life.

Oliver, a considerate neighbor, introduces himself to Mackenzie so that she won’t be concerned to see evidence of life in the house that has been vacant for a year, but her surliness convinces him that he should avoid her. Unfortunately for his intentions, Oliver’s schnauzer, Strudel, and Mackenzie’s dachshund, Mr. Smith, find each other far more congenial than do their owners. In fact, Mr. Smith turns into a regular escape artist in his pursuit of Strudel, a fact that exacerbates the conflict between the dog owners. It’s not until Oliver helps Mackenzie when her house is inundated by storm runoff that the two establish friendly relations. As they spend time together, the attraction between them grows, but they both have to deal with baggage from their pasts before they are ready to commit to a new life they can share.

Oliver is wonderful—smart and sexy and generous with a sense of humor and a love of music. Add to these qualities his love for his dog, his songwriting skills, and his chestnut red hair, and you have a near perfect hero in my opinion. I adored him from the start. Mackenzie was more difficult to like. While I found her tenacity and courage admirable, I was put off initially by her self-absorption and coldness. But I changed my mind about her gradually, and the ending where she took action rather than meekly accepting Oliver’s fear-motivated choices pushed her high on my list of favorite heroines.

Characters are always the most important element in my response to fiction, and Mayberry is among the very best at creating characters who become real and significant. The choices Oliver makes when he discovers his wife’s infidelity, for example, are choices I can see men I know making in his circumstances. I love that both the hero and heroine are adults who have lived long enough to have experienced life and that their experience includes but is not limited to sex. I love that this is a book about two people developing a relationship not about strangers who fall in lust at first sight and never seem to have anything in common other than desire. And the fact that Oliver and Mackenzie achieve their HEA only after effort on both their parts and that their HEA includes professional and personal success made me want to cheer loudly. Readers who define action in terms of explosions, literal and figurative, may not understand the appeal of Mayberry’s books, but if you read contemporary romance because you are interested in relationships with all their complexities, challenges, and rewards, I highly recommend this book. That’s my usual response to a Mayberry book.

"Autobuy" is a word we hear frequently in the romance reading community. Do you have auto-buy authors whose name on the cover is enough to persuade you that you must read the book?



CONTEST:


Harlequin Superromance is my favorite category imprint. A number of my autobuy authors write for this line. I was delighted when I learned that beginning in January 2012, the stories in this line would be longer and more complex. And the books I have read have more than fulfilled my expectations. I’ll follow today’s review with other January HSR reviews Wednesday Thursday.  On Thursday Friday, one randomly selected commenter will win her/his choice of the HSRs I review. (With apologies to international readers, this contest is open to U. S. residents only.)

A Hometown Boy

A Hometown Boy

By Janice Kay Johnson

Publisher: Harlequin (Superromance)

Release Date: January 2, 2013

David Owens and Acadia Henderson grew up as neighbors in the small town of Tucannon, Washington. Acadia had a crush on the older David, but at thirteen when her parents divorced, she moved to California with her mother. Except for one brief, magical summer, David became part of her past. Now they are both returning to Tucannon, but the Tucannon that awaits them is not the idyllic town they knew as children. It has become a scene from a nightmare, a horror so great that even David, a prosecutor, and Acadia, a trauma nurse, aren’t really prepared for it.

Robbie Owen, David’s older brother and a paranoid schizophrenic, has killed six of his neighbors and himself with guns stolen from his dead father’s gun safe. One of the victims is Charlie Henderson, Acadia’s mild-mannered, book-loving father. It is in these circumstances that Davis and Acadia meet again and are drawn together by their grief and regret, by their memories, and by an attraction that flourishes amid the tragedy and heartbreak that are the grim legacies of a few moments of terror.

David and Acadia are decent, intelligent, complex people. In addition to feelings of horror and loss, they are both struggling with guilt. David, the good son who never gave his parents a moment’s trouble, must face the resentment he felt over his parents’ immersion in his brother’s illness and the haunting questions of whether different choices could have prevented the horrific ending of his brother’s life. Acadia never fully forgave her father for not fighting to keep his family, and she is inundated with remorse over all the time she failed to spend with him and all the words she never said to him. It is easy to hope that somehow they can nurture the feelings they have for each other and find a way to build a life together despite the odds they face.

But this book is more than a romance. It is also the story of a town and its people caught in the aftermath of an unimaginable act. It is the story of the dead—a humorless grouch, an ex-marine who was heroic to the end, a kindly pharmacist who always had a smile for everyone and candy for kids—and the living—a mother broken by grief for the son she loved despite what his disease made of him and by the guilt that somehow she could have stopped him, the police officer who combines dedication and intelligence with compassion, the young mechanic coping with survivor’s guilt and the conviction that a hero died to save a coward like him. It is the story of how tragedy exposes the baseness and self-centeredness of some and the grace and great-heartedness of others. It is the story of the cost mental illness exacts from those who suffer with it, from their families, and ultimately from the social system so poorly prepared to deal with mental illness.

There will be readers who fault this book for being dark and anything but romantic. Others will find the book moving, haunting, and ultimately an affirmation of the transformative power of love in many forms. Janice Kay Johnson has long been one of my autobuy authors, and I was aware of her ability to weave unforgettable stories rich in their complexity and completeness. But even for so gifted a writer, A Hometown Boy is an extraordinary book, one that, in the wake of recent events, carries layers never expected by the author or the publisher. It is a reminder of all the stories that remain untold by the headlines in newspapers and magazines. This is one I can’t forget, and it should silence forever those who label category romance as inevitably lightweight and insubstantial.

I was unprepared for the story A Hometown Boy gave me. What was the last book that surprised you by being a larger, more important story than you expected?



CONTEST:

Harlequin Superromance is my favorite category imprint. A number of my auto-buy authors write for this line. I was delighted when I learned that beginning in January 2013, the stories in this line would be longer and more complex. And the books I have read have more than fulfilled my expectations. I’ll follow today’s review with other January HSR reviews tomorrow and Wednesday Thursday.  On Thursday Friday, one randomly selected commenter will win her/his choice of the HSRs I review. (With apologies to international readers, this contest is open to U. S. residents only.)

Tuesday Review: Within Reach

Within Reach
By Sarah Mayberry
Publisher: Harlequin
Release Date: August 7, 2012

 Angela Bartlett and Billie Young have been friends since they were young girls at boarding school. The effervescent Billie and the contained Angie are very different personalities, but they balance one another, and they are true sister-friends. Of course, Angie is there to celebrate Billie’s thirty-second birthday  with her, her husband Michael, their children—five-year-old Eva and baby Charlie—and assorted friends and neighbors. But the unthinkable happens: Billie, vital and vibrant at the beginning of the celebration, is dead of an undiagnosed heart problem before the evening’s end.

Ten months later Angie returns from a trip to New York where she’s been training with an American  jewelry designer and finds a gaunt Michael merely going through the motions of living, surrounded by clutter and dust and two children whom he loves desperately but with whom he’s hardly connecting. It’s another blow to Angie’s heart to see what has happened to Billie’s family. Determined to help in any way she can, she offers practical help with the house and the children, but she offers tough love as well, telling Michael that he has become a zombie living in a cave and suggesting that he change his plan to take a year off and return to his work and to life.

Michael, at first angry about Angie’s comments, is forced to reconsider when his daughter reminds him of broken promises to her. Michael recognizes that he owes it to his children to move out of the shadows into the light. He apologizes to Angie and accepts her advice about work. Over the next months, Angie spends a great deal of time with Michael and the children, picking Eva up after school, sharing meals, and developing a real friendship with Michael as an individual and not just as her friend’s husband.

As the friendship between Angie and Michael deepens, an awareness of one another shifts to desire. For both of them, the desire is mixed with guilt. Angie still thinks of Michael as belonging to Billie, and Michael still thinks of himself as married to Billie. They can’t build a future together until each of them can come to terms with what once was and accept with joy what can be.

I’ve been a Sarah Mayberry fan since I read Home for the Holidays and loved it back in 2009. I glommed her backlist and have eagerly awaited subsequent books, all of which I’ve enjoyed.  But I think Within Reach is the best she’s written. Mayberry’s characters always seem real; they behave like adults who know what it is to hurt, to dream, to grow. And Mayberry has the knack for giving her readers romances with plenty of sizzle without making the characters appear to have the libidos of adolescent males. But Within Reach goes beyond her usual excellent romance to present a powerful and moving look at grief and recovery.

Because the reader meets and likes Billie Young in the prologue and sees her interacting with her best friend as well as her husband and children, the empathy evoked for both Angie and Michael has a dimension it would lack had Billie been merely a name. The unrequited love for a best friend’s spouse or lover that blossoms into mutual love after the death of the friend is standard fare in romance fiction, and it has been handled skillfully by some authors, disastrously by others. But what Mayberry does is different, and I think more difficult. Before Billie’s death, Angie and Michael’s relationship is solely through Billie. They like one another, but they define one another in terms of Billie. Angie sees Michael as Billie’s husband; Michael sees Angie as Billie’s best friend.  This removes any sleaze factor from what happens later, and it allows Mayberry to show their relationship develop gradually with the emotional connection strengthening as the sexual tension increases.

The intimacy between them grows naturally from the time they spend together, their mutual commitment to Eva and Charlie, the honest conversations they have, and their concern about each other’s well being. And Mayberry never oversimplifies the process. The relationship, emotional and physical, is a series of advances and retreats, and both Angie and Michael struggle with feelings of guilt and disloyalty each step of the way.

Angie’s relationship with Eva and Charlie is separate from her feelings about Michael. She is a beloved figure in their lives before Billie’s death, and her love and concern for them never diminishes. Even when she thinks she and Michael can have no future, she knows that somehow that she will continue to be a part of the lives of these children. They are paramount for Michael. It is his realization of what his hopelessness is doing to them that pushes him to take the first moves beyond grief. Mayberry also makes readers see the children as individuals. Eva is smart and funny and very much her mother’s daughter in her joy in life. Even young Charlie has a definite personality.

Finally, Mayberry never diminishes the love both Angie and Michael have for Billie.  Each understands the loss the other suffered.  When Angie sees Michael upon her return from New York, she thinks, “He’d loved Billie so much. She’d been the center of his world and she’d died far, far too young. Was it any wonder that he was finding it so hard to pull himself together and move on?”

Even when Michael is angered by what Angie says to him about moving out of his cave, he recognizes what she shared with Billie: “She and Billie had been more like sisters than friends. They had finished each other’s sentences, said the honest thing when it needed to be said and been each other’s best cheerleaders.” The love they had for Billie will go on. It is part of them, and the love they share is neither greater nor lesser than the one Michael shared with Billie. It is equal—and different because grief has made these two people different from the persons they once were.

I would like to have seen another chapter, or perhaps an epilogue. I came to care about these characters so much that I wanted to see more of the HEA. I applaud their recognition that the life ahead of them will doubtless hold problems, but I longed to bask in their happiness see a bit of their future with the children. But maybe that’s the sign of a great read—the reader just doesn’t want to let go of the characters. 

It’s probably redundant to add this, but I highly recommend Within Reach. I’ve added it to my best of 2012 list.

What’s the last book you read that left you reluctant to say goodbye to the characters? Do you think this reluctance explains the popularity of series?

I loved this book so much that I want to share it. I’ll give a copy to one randomly selected commenter (from among U. S readers).