Tuesday Review: The Perfect Match

The Perfect Match

By Kristan Higgins

Publisher: Harlequin HQN

Release Date: 

October 29, 2013

Honor Holland, the organized, responsible, got-everything-together middle Holland sister didn’t know it at the time, but her thirty-fifth birthday marked a turning point in her life. First, during her annual exam, her gyn, Dr. Jeremy Lyon, her sister’s gay ex, cautioned her that the optimal age for pregnancy was past, her eggs were aging, and if she wanted children, she needed to consider her options. Honor knows exactly whom she wants to father her children. She and Brogan Cain have been close friends since the fourth grade, Honor has been in love with him since their senior prom, and they have been friends with intermittent benefits since they were freshmen in college. Now he’s a photographer for Sports Illustrated with a glamorous job and high profile friends, but he’s still a nice guy who calls Manningsport home and hangs out with Honor. But when Honor’s attempt at seduction turns into disaster, and her proposal prompts Brogan to call her his best friend and liken her to “an old baseball glove,” she is forced to realize there’s not much hope of her dreams coming true. Six weeks later, the little hope that remains is crushed when Brogan and Honor’s best friend Dana, announce their engagement. The very ring that Honor had picked out as the one Brogan would give her shone triumphantly on Dana’s left hand.  Honor clearly needs a life makeover.

Mechanical engineering professor Tom Barlow needs a green card. Without one, he is going to have to leave the United States and return to England. While that might be the best thing for his career, since his job at tiny Wickham College is on the lower rungs of the academic prestige ladder, it would mean leaving Charlie, the teenage son of Tom’s fiancée Melissa, who was killed in an accident two years ago. Tom has no official claim on Charlie, but he has loved the boy since he was a grinning ten-year-old who loved fishing trips and building model airplanes with Tom. Since his mother’s death, Charlie seems to have turned into a brooding adolescent who hates the world in general and Tom in particular. But Charlie’s attitude doesn’t lessen Tom’s affection or his sense of responsibility for the teen whose maternal grandparents merely tolerate him and whose father is a peripatetic presence in his life. Tom’s aunt reminds him that marriage will solve his green card problem.

Honor and Tom have a rocky start with a blind state, but a spark struck at their second meeting ignites one snowy evening when Tom helps Honor out of an awkward situation. Soon the two are planning a marriage of convenience. Honor moves in with Tom to see if their compatibility extends beyond the bedroom and to create a convincing image for the Immigration and Naturalization Service. But love is anything but convenient for Tom who has been badly burned during his engagement, and when Honor fall in love with him, he is terrified. When spring comes, Honor is planning a wedding, but it’s not hers. Will she and Tom ever find the HEA they deserve?

This is the second book in Higgins’s Blue Heron series, and while this one doesn’t quite reach the so-amazing-I-want-to-reread-it-immediately level of The Best Man, it is still a terrific book with all of Higgins’s trademark humor, believable contemporary relationships, family interactions, and puppy love. Honor is an endearing heroine, supremely confident of herself professionally but vulnerable and insecure when it comes to romance. Because she has been in love with Brogan for half her life and has never really considered what her life would be without him, her lack of confidence is credible. I loved the makeover scene, especially when the males join the ladies.

Tom may be my favorite Higgins hero ever. He’s a professor, he has a British accent, he loves his unofficial stepson, and he has a killer sense of humor. All these things make him irresistible from my point of view, which is fortunate since that makes it easier to forgive him when he acts like a jerk later. He redeems himself beautifully, and, without moving into spoiler territory, I’ll just say that I cheered Higgins for the timing of his reversal. I would have been so disappointed if she had gone for the cliché.

I am not a member of the Anti-epilogue League. My cynicism quotient is too low. I’m a fan of aww moments, sweet but not saccharine, that leave me with a smile and a tear and all the loose ends tied up in a bright, celebratory bow. So Higgins’s epilogue rates an A+ from me. The plus is because Charlie got a happy ending too.

I fell in love with the Holland family in the first book, and it was lovely to see Faith and Levi exchanging quips and hot looks, Pru still looking for ways to keep the spice in her long marriage, and Goggy and Pops bickering with undiminished energy. I loved the secondary romance, and brother Jack looks more interesting in this one. Colleen O'Rourke’s story is next in Waiting for You, a reunion romance scheduled for release on March 25. But I hope to see more of Jack, and there’s Colleen’s twin and co-tavern owner Connor too. Pru’s kids are both interesting characters too, and then there is Levi’s old friend Jessica. I’ll be happy to see this series continue through several more books.

If you are a Higgins fan, I promise The Perfect Match will be one of your favorites. If you have never read Kristan Higgins, you are missing one of the best authors writing contemporary romance. The Perfect Match can be read as a standalone, and I definitely recommend it. Honestly, my grin won’t be too smug when I hear you are glomming her backlist.

I know when I pick up a Kristan Higgins book that I am going to experience some character-driven, laugh-out-loud moments that leave me chuckling as I recall them for days afterward. Who tops your list for genuinely funny contemporary romance?

Saturday Review: The Next Best Thing

The Next Best Thing

By Kristan Higgins

Publisher: Harlequin HQN

Release Date: August 27, 2013

(reissue of February 2010 release)

Lucy Lang is the youngest widow in a family in which being widowed young has become a family tradition. Her grandmother was widowed young, and her mother and two aunts, Rose and Iris, are known in Mackerly, Rhode Island, as the Black Widows, a nickname that plays on their maiden name (Hungarian Fekete translated into English as Black) and references the fact that they were all widowed before they turned fifty. Lucy’s husband, Jimmy Mirabelli, died in an automobile accident before they celebrated their first anniversary. More than five years later, Lucy still has not really moved on with her life. She has the training and the talent to make her one-time dream of becoming an award-winning pastry chef a reality, but she has given up that dream to become the bread expert in Bunny’s, the family bakery where her mother and aunts work. She creates desserts for classes she teaches and for friends and family, but she can’t eat them herself because they taste like ashes.

Ethan Mirabelli is the younger brother of Jimmy. He and Lucy are long-time friends. In fact, it was he who introduced Lucy to Jimmy. In the months following Jimmy’s death, Ethan was her rock, the only one who seemed to understand the intensity of Lucy’s grief. A couple of years earlier, the friendship that had sustained Lucy through her most difficult days added another dimension. Lucy and Ethan became lovers. She trusts Ethan to understand that their friendship with benefits doesn’t change her feelings for Jimmy. In fact, it doesn’t even slow down the frequency of her re-viewing her wedding video or enable her to visit Jimmy’s grave. Ethan, who has been in love with Lucy forever, is endlessly patient and nurturing, trusting that in time Lucy will let go of her grief and realize what the two of them share.

When Lucy’s younger sister Corinne gives birth to a daughter, Lucy is made aware of how much she longs for children of her own. So great is this longing that Lucy decides she will reject the family pattern of remaining a widow and look for a second husband. Her primary criterion is that he be a nice guy for whom she will feel a tepid affection but who will not inspire the kind of all-encompassing love that she felt for Jimmy. Such a relationship will provide a father for her children but will not affect Jimmy’s status as her One True Love or put her heart at risk for another shattering. Her new plan requited that she end the benefits stage of her friendship with Ethan, but she is unprepared for how great the loss will be when Ethan accepts her decision by distancing himself from her or for how troubling she finds the idea of Ethan with another woman.

Like all of Kristan Higgins’s books, The Next Best Thing is eminently readable with characters who are believable and generally likeable, family dynamics that are charged with loyalties, friction, twists, and quirks, and humor balanced with some darker emotions. The ethnic references to Lucy’s Hungarian ancestry and to the Mirabelli’s Italian heritage add color and seasoning to the mix. Her trademark animal companion plays a less prominent role than is sometimes the case, but Fat Mickey, the curmudgeonly cat who was a gift to Lucy from Ethan, will surely have his admirers. Lucy’s desserts are so scrumptious that I’m persuaded the descriptions alone sent my scale edging up several pounds.

Despite all these reasons for liking The Next Best Thing, it is still not one of my favorites among Kristan Higgins books. I reread it with the hope that returning to it after seeing Lucy and Ethan’s HEA in process in the second Mackerly book, Somebody to Love (2012), would give me a greater appreciation for it. It didn’t. Lucy still impresses me as neurotic, her epiphany about Ethan’s role in her life still seems too late, and I still worry that Ethan deserves more. I remain an ardent Kristan Higgins fan, but I will reserve my unreserved raves for other Higgins books. Stay tuned for bells and balloons when I review her October release, The Perfect Match, in a few weeks.

Are you ever disappointed in a book from a favorite author? I make a distinction between a disappointing book, one in which I see clear strengths but that still fails to reach the standard I expect from the author, and a book that is either a failure or a Did Not Finish. Do you make such a distinction?

Tuesday Review: The Best Man

The Best Man

By Kristan Higgins

Publisher: Harlequin

Release Date: 

February 26, 2013

Faith Holland is returning to her hometown of Manningsport, New York, after three and a half years in San Francisco. Except for seven brief visits for holidays with her family, Faith hasn’t been back since she left after being jilted literally at the altar when what was supposed to be the perfect wedding of the town’s golden couple turned into a stage for the groom’s coming out of the closet. But her social life in San Francisco has been a series of disasters, Faith’s siblings are convinced their widowed father is about to fall victim to a crass golddigger, and there’s an old stone barn on the family’s property that Faith is itching to turn into a site for weddings and other events. For all these reasons and because she has missed her family and the family vineyard, Faith has come home for a two-month stay, but she never expected Levi Cooper to be the first person she saw upon her return.

Levi has also returned to Manningsport. After a period of distinguished military service, he’s back, serving his hometown as chief of police. Levi and Faith have known each other since they were third graders, but Faith was Princess Super-Cute on the hill, a member of the Holland clan, one of the town's founding families, who had owned the land on which their vineyards stood for generations. Levi was trailer trash, the only son of a hardworking single mother. It was not until their senior year of high school that they were thrown into each other’s company by Jeremy Lyon, a transplanted Californian whose wealthy family owned the vineyards that bordered the Hollands’ land. Jeremy, a big-hearted Mr. Perfect, ignored the class divisions that separated the kids in the trailer park from the kids on the hill and claimed Levi as his best friend. Since Faith and Jeremy were an item almost from the moment he came to her aid during one of her epileptic seizures, Faith and Levi spent a great deal of time in one another’s company, never exactly friends but always uneasily aware of each other.

Eight years after high school graduation, Jeremy had completed medical school, Faith had finished her training as a landscape architect, and the two were about to be married in a wedding all of Manningsport had been anticipating for years. Levi, a decorated soldier on leave for the occasion, was Jeremy’s best man. He was also the one who stopped the wedding and ended Faith’s dreams of the perfect life she and Jeremy would build. Can Faith ever move past that moment? And if she can, can Levi trust her to be the one person he loves who doesn’t leave him?

In The Best Man, Kristan Higgins gives readers a story that combines scenes worth of a twenty-first-century Lucille Ball with scenes that will have readers reaching for a hanky to catch the tears. Faith is a wonderful heroine, funny and flawed and endearing. Levi is a total guy--uncomfortable with emotions (his own and those of others), deeply committed to taking care of problems, and a better man than he himself will ever recognize. These are characters who will engage readers' attention and capture their hearts.

But Higgins gives readers more that a great romance in this book; she gives them a complete world set in a place so real one can see the clouds over the lake and smell the grapes growing on land saturated in family history. Beyond Faith and Levi, Higgins includes a large cast of quirky characters, each of whom possesses a distinct, individual presence. Faith’s large family (three generations of them), Levi’s co-workers, the citizens of Manningsport, Jeremy Lyon, and Blue (There has to be a dog. This is a Kristan Higgins story.)—each adds something special to this book. I fell in love not just with Faith and Levi but also with the place and the people to which they belong. I hope The Best Man is the first in a series because I want to go back to Manningsport.

What’s the last book you read that led you to fall in love not just with the protagonist but with the fictional world he/she inhabits?

Tuesday Review: Somebody to Love

Somebody to Love

By Kristan Higgins

Publisher: HQN

Release Date: April 3, 2012

Some days it just doesn’t pay to get out of bed. Parker Welles begins the day with her biggest problem finding a new idea for another series of children’s books since she’s sent the Holy Rollers, the roller skating angels whose adventures she has been writing for six years, to their eternal reward. Parker is thrilled to be finished with the Holy Rollers, a series “so sickeningly precious it made The Velveteen Rabbit look like a chapter out of Sin City.” A few hours later, the trust-fund baby who is so wealthy that she donated all her income from the Holy Rollers books and movies to Save the Children has less than  a month to clear her personal possessions out of Grayhurst, the family mansion , where she has been living with her five-year-old son, Nicky. Her father has lost her trust fund and Nicky’s along with all his own property in an attempt to cover investor losses in an insider-trading scheme gone bad. The $6000 in her personal checking account, $5000 in cash from her father, jewelry worth another couple of thousand, and a house in Gideon’s Bay, Maine, make up her total assets. (Gideon’s Bay is the setting of Catch of the Day. And, yes, Maggie and the enigmatic Malone are around planning their wedding.)

Parker’s father is headed for jail, her mother’s marriage to husband #4 is in trouble, and her son is set for a three-week vacation in California with his father. (Higgins fans will remember Ethan Mirabelli and his wife Lucy from The Next Best Thing) Parker plans to check out the house in Maine, spend a few dollars on cosmetic repairs, sell the house, and return with a nest egg that will allow her to find a place to live, care for her son, and take time to determine what she’s going to do with the rest of her life. But predictably her plans go agley. The Maine house will require a great deal more than cosmetic improvements if Parker is to sell it. In short, it’s a disaster. And Parker’s experience with do-it-yourself projects is zilch.

The situation is dire. Thank goodness for James Cahill. Cahill, commonly referred to by Parker as “Thing One,” is the personal lawyer of Harry Welles. Parker sees Cahill as just another of her father’s minions, and she has assured him that she does not need his help. But Cahill has decided to help whether she wants him to or not because he owes Harry Welles for giving him a job and because he fell for Parker the first time he saw her in the hospital shortly after the birth of her son. James has the skills Parker needs to renovate the house, and since she thinks he’s still on her father’s payroll, she accepts his help.

As they work together on the house, Parker discovers that James is very different from her perception of him. Not only is the attraction that burned between them on one occasion still very much alive, but a genuine friendship develops as well. Soon the two are engaged in what Parker persists in calling a summer fling, but feelings are too deep and Parker and James matter too much to each other for their relationship to remain a mere fling. When Nicky returns, he and James bond, after some initial resistance from Nicky, but just as an HEA seems within reach, James’ past shows up and Parker’s reluctance to trust this man seems to have been well-founded after all.

I count myself a Kristan Higgins fan, but her books see-saw between books I love unreservedly and those I love many things about but . . . Somebody to Love falls in the latter category. I was delighted to see Higgins give third person point of view a try. Also, since I enjoyed both Catch of the Day and The Next Best Thing, I was pleased by the connections. I though James was a wonderful hero, a good guy with complications whom I rooted for from the get-go. Nicky was an endearing but believable five-year-old with an imagination, a stubborn streak, and some reservations about a new man in his mother’s life. But it took me a long time to like Parker. I was glad that she recognized that with $11,000 and a house, she was better off that a sizeable segment of the population, I was pleased that she admitted her best friend being married to the father of Parker’s son was on the strange side, and I admired her commitment to her son. But I found her designation of James as Thing One spoiled princess behavior and her disdain for her characters who were vivid enough for her to converse with bothered me.  Her coy references to “Lady Land” bothered me more.  I did like her better by the book’s end, but I never found her as engaging as I found James. Still, the book has the trademark Higgins humor, a lovable pooch, the sense of real contemporary life, and more substance than some romantic comedies. I definitely recommend it, and you may like Parker more than I did. Plus I really did love the role of Mickey the Fire Engine, and the epilogue was lovely, just sweet enough to leave me smiling and sighing.

Are you a fan of romantic comedies? What are some of your favorites among books? Among movies?