No River Too Wide

No River Too Wide

By Emilie Richards

Publisher: Harlequin MIRA

Release Date: June 24, 2014

Janine Stoddard has spent twenty-five years as the wife of an abusive husband, but there is still enough spirit left in her to seize the opportunity to escape when she is offered help by Moving On, an underground highway for abused women. One night when her husband is away, she puts her carefully conceived plan into effect, leaving her luxurious Topeka, Kansas, prison in flames. Janine has refused contact with her daughter because she feared her husband would somehow discover Harmony’s location, but she longs to see her daughter and the nine-month-old granddaughter she has never met before she settles somewhere to begin a new life. Thus, she heads for Asheville, North Carolina, for what she plans to be a brief stop before moving on to New Hampshire where she hopes to be safe.

Harmony has checked the Topeka Capiatal-Journal every few weeks since her mother told her never to call home again more than a year ago, expecting to see a headline reporting her mother’s death. She’s heartbroken but not surprised when she thinks her mother has perished in the fire, but surprised is an understatement of her feelings when her mother shows up on the farm outside Asheville where Harmony works as a Jill-of-all-trades and lives in a garage apartment. Harmony’s friend Taylor Martin sees offering Jan a home as a way of repaying Harmony for all that Harmony did for Taylor’s mother. With Taylor living twenty miles away on the other side of Asheville, Jan will be away from Harmony but close enough for the Jan to see her daughter and granddaughter occasionally. When Taylor tells Jan that her being with Taylor’s eleven-year-old daughter when Taylor has to be away on school nights will be a help, Jan agrees to stay.

Richards deftly weaves together the stories of these three women and adds the mystery of Rex’s Stoddard’s disappearance to complicate things. Despite the insurance fraud thread and a romance between the cautious Taylor and Adam Pryor, a new man in town with secrets of his own, No River Too Wide is a story about growth and forgiveness, including self-forgiveness, which may be more difficult than forgiving others.

Emilie Richards is one of the writers whose books I began reading in the 1980s and have followed her from category fiction to single-title contemporary romance to mystery to women’s fiction and enjoyed each phase of the journey. No River Too Wide, the third book in her Goddesses Anonymous series, has the emotionally rich contexts and layered characters that have kept me reading this author for nearly three decades. Whether she is writing about troubled marriages, complex family dynamics, the tendrils of the past that cling to human lives, or any one of a dozen or more social issues that touch the lives of her characters--and her readers--Emilie Richards is one of the best writers in popular fiction.

Books about battered women have become common in recent years, but few show as full a portrait of a woman abused over decades as Richards offers in this book. Alternately heart-rending and inspiring, No River Too Wide reveals a woman almost destroyed by physical and psychological abuse who has the courage to accept help, one who gradually forgives herself, regains her self-respect, and acquires a new appreciation of the freedom to make choices and to grow into an independent woman.

“It didn’t matter if she was frightened by everyday things that others took for granted. It didn’t matter if she felt alone in the world, something Rex had repeatedly warned her would happen if she ever tried to leave him. It didn’t matter that she no longer knew what a woman like her could actually achieve. Perhaps it didn’t even matter that she had failed at the things she had most hoped to accomplish and was still seeking forgiveness. . . .”

Although Harmony was a lesser target of her father’s abuse than was her mother and, with her mother’s help, she escaped as soon as she graduated from high school, she bears her own scars. She loves her mother, but she also blames her for not leaving sooner. She is also suspicious of lives that seem too perfect from the outside, having experienced the horror that could be concealed behind the happy family image.

Taylor learned some painful lessons through her estrangement and reconciliation with her mother (One Mountain Away). She explains to her daughter Maddie:

“Here’s what you need to learn from everything that happened with Mom and me. We loved each other but we let our differences get in the way. I held a grudge for years, almost to the end of her life, and I was wrong to do that. Very wrong.”

But Taylor’s learning is incomplete; she still finds it difficult to forgive when people fall short of her expectations.

One of the joys of reading this book is seeing the growth that takes place in many characters from the three women who are primary to baby Lottie’s father. For readers who like a romance line even in their women’s fiction, there is Taylor’s relationship with Adam, a man who wants to do the right thing but finds it difficult to reconcile his professional responsibilities with the dictates of his conscience. I also liked Harmony’s reentry to the world of dating and her admission that Mr. Perfect may also be Mr. Not Right for me.

I’m sure it is clear by now that I loved No River Too Wide. It’s another Richards keeper for me, and I highly recommend it. I do feel I should add one caveat: this book can be read as a standalone, but readers who have not read One Mountain Away may feel as if Harmony and Taylor’s stories are incomplete. Reading the two books makes for a richer, more meaningful reading experience. The second book, Somewhere Between Luck and Trust, is also excellent, but it is more loosely connected.


Do you have a keeper shelf? What’s your most recent addition to it?

Saturday Review: Evening Stars

Evening Stars

By Susan Mallery

Publisher: Harlequin Mira

Release Date: 

February 25, 2014

Susan Mallery takes her readers back to Blackberry Island for the third installment in this popular women’s fiction series set on a fictional island in Washington’s Puget Sound. The first two novels in the series focused on female friendship: childhood friends estranged and reunited in Barefoot Season and new friendships that develop into intimate, healing relationships in Three Sisters. The third focuses on the relationship between two sisters and, to a lesser degree, between the sisters and their mother.

Nina Wentworth was still a child when she realized that she had to be the responsible one in her family. Her mother, Bonnie, a perpetual adolescent, loves her daughters, but, lacking self-discipline and any sense of responsibility, she is incapable of being the parent her daughters need. It falls to Nina to mother her younger sister Averil, to see that her mother’s flightiness doesn’t force them to close the doors of Blackberry Preserves, Bonnie’s antique shop, and to keep their house from falling in around them. Once Nina had dreams of leaving the island, becoming a doctor, and building a life with Dylan Harrington, the only son of Blackberry Island’s only doctor. But Dylan left alone, and Nina switched to nursing because it only required her to be away from the island for two years. Now her life has become rather bland and routine, but change is on the way. First, Dylan returns to join his father’s medical practice and to remind Nina of all they once shared, and then Kyle Eastland, a Navy pilot, lays siege to Nina’s heart—and other body parts.

At Nina’s urging, Averil did leave Blackberry Island to explore a larger world. Averil should be happy. She has been married for five years to Kevin Stanton, a man who loves her deeply, and she has a job writing for a magazine for teenage girls that many other young journalists envy. But Averil finds her life unsatisfying, and she feels pressured by Kevin’s desire for a family. She still thinks of Blackberry Island as home. Quitting her job and leaving her marriage a question mark, she returns to the island to find answers and her lost self.

When Bonnie returns from her buying trip, the three women are once again together, confronted with the complicated mix of love, resentment, and misunderstanding that defines their relationship to one another. Mallery once again proves that she is as deft at writing about women’s journeys of self-discovery as she is at writing heart-melting romance. While Evening Stars has strong romantic elements, the heart of the story is family dynamics, particularly the roles assigned early that shape the women girls grow up to become and the power to change old roles and to reclaim one’s dreams.

Mallery ends her Blackberry Island series with a story that should please her fans and win her some new readers. If you like women’s fiction that includes romance threads that end with HEAs, I definitely recommend this book.

I prefer optimistic endings even in the women’s fiction I read. Perhaps that’s why most of my favorite women’s fiction writers also write or have written romance. Do you prefer at least the promise of a happy future, or are you satisfied with endings that leave you with less resolution?

Tuesday Review: The Cottage on Juniper Ridge

The Cottage on Juniper Ridge

By Sheila Roberts

Publisher: Harlequin Mira

Release Date:

February 25, 2014

Jen Heath has lost all joy in her life. She is working two jobs in order to pay her mortgage, her car payment, and her maxed out credit cards. Looking back, she realizes she was crazy to buy the Seattle condo she fell in love with but couldn’t really afford and crazier to hit the limit on her credit cards for all the furniture and accessories she just had to have for her new home. Now she has no time to enjoy her home or her friends, and even finding time for her family is a stretch. A year after her divorce, she still can’t find time to date. Jen used to love Christmas, but now the holiday just means more tasks added to her must-do list. After a particularly difficult day, Jen goes home, calls in sick, and curls up with a book that her sister gave her—Simplicity by Muriel Sterling. As a result of reading the book, in an impulsive move to simplify her life, Jen quits her job, puts her condo up for sale, and moves to the small town of Icicle Falls, Washington, where she discovers the joys of life with fewer stresses, including a part-time job at a bookstore, and new friends who are kindred spirits, and begins writing a book. Learning to drive on snowy roads presents a challenge, but if only her landlord, sexy firefighter Garrett Armstrong, would stop jumping to conclusions about her similarity to his irresponsible ex-wife, life would be practically perfect.

Jen is only one of the women whose lives are transformed by reading Simplicity. Stacy Thomas’s motto when it comes to collectibles or sale items is the more, the merrier. When she decorates her home for Christmas, it is so cluttered that her guests can’t find a place to set a cup of coffee, and her husband complains that she has taken over their shared closets. Single mother, Chita Arness is stretched so thin with her job, her kids, and her volunteer activities that she has no time for herself. Even Jen’s sister Toni worries that her husband’s work which, thanks to the computer, infringes on personal time, her daughter’s constant texting, and her son’s video games are destroying the loving connection that once characterized her marriage and family.  Each of these women will discover ways to simplify her life, ways that will allow her to have a life that is richer and more satisfying than the one she has known.

 Although there are several romantic elements in The Cottage on Juniper Ridge, the primary one being Jen and Garrett’s relationship, the novel is more women’s fiction than romance. The focus is on the women and their friendships and individual journeys, and the romances are just one part of the women’s lives. As readers familiar with Sheila Roberts’s books will expect, there is a rich vein of humor, some of it quite broad and some of it wonderfully subtle. I found myself smiling a lot during the sisterly exchanges between Jen and Toni.  But there is also wisdom that most of us would do well to heed in the idea of simplifying complicated, overextended lives.

I’ve enjoyed all of the Icicle Falls books, but this one is my favorite. I liked Jen, and even though I could have shaken Garrett a few times, I liked him too. His stubborn clinging to clearly wrong-headed conclusions and his basic decency reminded me of men I know. I also liked that Roberts showcased women at various stages of their lives—from the single Jen to the older, twice-widowed author of Simplicity. This is the fourth book in the series, and while it can be read as a standalone, it is a more satisfying reading experience for those who have read the other books and are familiar with Icicle Falls.

I know people who are skeptical about the power of a book to change lives, but I’m a believer because I can point to several that changed mine. Can you point to particular books that changed your life in specific ways?

Tuesday Review: The First Boy I Loved

The First Boy I Loved

By Cheryl Reavis
Publisher:
Bell Bridge Books
Release Date:
January 16, 2014

 

Since her husband’s death, Gillian Warner has been haunted by a past that refuses to stay buried and secrets that belong to a time in her life before she became a wife, a mother, a grandmother—a past that belongs to a younger Gilly and her first love who died in Vietnam decades ago. When it turns out that her closest friend from her nursing school days is now living in Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City), Gilly plans a month-long visit that she hopes will not only allow her to renew her friendship with June but also come to terms with her guilt and regrets and her “relentless remembering” of Ben Tucker. At the last moment, a separate family crisis gives Gilly a companion on her journey, her fifteen-year-old granddaughter Mae who is heartbroken over the betrayal of her first love.

One of the first people Gilly meets in Vietnam is A. J. Donegan, a Vietnam vet and expatriate who serves as a tour guide for guilty, grieving Americans who come to Vietnam to make peace with their pasts and the losses they cannot forget.  A. J., haunted by his own ghosts, knows that the peace the visitors hope to find will prove elusive. As Mae faces her own losses, A. J. shows Gilly the city as few visitors see it, including but not limited to the sites central to Tucker’s life there, and introduces her to residents who have their own memories and varying responses to the past. An attraction develops between them, but can two people whose pasts still claim them so inescapably find a future together?

In The First Boy I Loved, Cheryl Reavis speaks the language of the heart with grace and truth. She cuts past the differences that separate human beings by age and gender and race and reveals experiences we all share—the loss of innocence, the heartbreak of harsh realities, the regrets that never lose their sting, and the many facets of love that help us to survive and even triumph, scarred though we be by our journeys.

I’ve been a Cheryl Reavis fan for more than twenty years, and I regularly recommend her books to other readers. I was delighted to see a Reavis book I had not read listed in the NetGalley catalog and even more delighted that it lived up to every expectation. This book, more women’s fiction with a strong romantic element, will make you laugh, make you cry, and perhaps make you newly conscious of your own “relentless remembering.” Reavis’s deft hand with characterization is evident in her creation of Gilly and A.J., both of them so real I could almost touch them, but also in a wealth of secondary characters from the achingly adolescent Mae to the faithful friend June to the Vietnamese doctor who treats Mae with skill and compassion despite her dislike for Americans rooted in her father’s death in the American War.

Readers who demand a conventional HEA may not be satisfied with the ending, although I have difficulty imaging a more perfect conclusion than the last line, and the story will likely resonate with particular power for those who are old enough to remember the Vietnam War. But I highly recommend this book for anyone who values emotionally compelling stories and excellent writing.

 

Just seeing a new title from Cheryl Reavis left me with a smile on my face. Who are the authors that evoke that response from you?

Saturday Review: A Slight Change of Plan

A Slight Change of Plan

By Dee Ernst

Publisher: Montlake

Release Date: 

November 19, 2013

Kate Freemont Everett is fifty-five years old and in the process of crafting a new stage in her life. Her husband, a workaholic ob-gyn, died of a heart attack eight years ago. Kate had reached the conclusion that their marriage was short of satisfactory before his death, and while she grieved his premature passing, she settled into widowhood without major difficulties. Her husband’s workaholic ways left her amply provided for financially, so she has no money worries. But now her youngest child, a computer geek, is on the verge of graduating from college and will soon be apartment hunting with his first serious girlfriend; her middle child and only daughter, a veterinarian, is about to be married to her long-time boyfriend; and her oldest is a successful cartoonist living happily with his partner in a west Village apartment.

It’s not that Kate’s life is empty. She has a successful career as a tax lawyer, she is close to her kids and to her younger sister, and her best friend of forty-eight years is always available for lunches and shopping and the kind of open, cabbages-and-kings conversations that every woman needs. She has two cats, Seven and Eight, and a dog named Boone, part spaniel, part terrier, who thinks she’s a cat, for furry companionship. But despite her blessings, Kate is ready for a change. She left her job with a nice severance package, she is prepared to sell the house where she brought up her children and let someone else worry about cleaning and upkeep on five bedrooms, three and a half baths, three-car garage, pool, and finished basement. Kate wants a condo with health club privileges and walking trails for Boone. She also wants someone to share her life, inside and outside the bedroom.  She hasn’t had a date in more than thirty years, but her sister has persuaded her to register on an online dating site.

Kate finds out that Robbie Burns was right about plans “Gang aft agley,” although disruptions to Kate’s plans--things like a wedding with a fraction of the guests she thinks should be invited, a genius son and his even greater genius girlfriend sharing her condo, a wrinkle in her cartoonists son’s perfect relationship, and her estranged mother moving into her basement—are not exactly grief-provoking or painful exactly. Maybe Robbie was only half right. After some disasters, her dating life is improving. In fact, it’s getting downright complicated. There’s the online match, who is a nice guy, and the sex is good, but he’s a bit controlling. Then there’s the blast from the past, the Real True Love who has remained in her memories and in her heart. Then there’s the interesting Englishman, but his ex-wife is a real bitch, and she also happens to be the future mother-in-law of Kate’s daughter. Kate’s calendar and her life are full, but her plan? Let’s just say it’s changing.

Last year I did something I rarely do. I bought Dee Ernst’s debut novel, Better Off Without Him (2010), an eBook, without having read a single review or having one friend recommend it. I bought it based solely on the description of a romance writer with teenage children going through a divorce with the help of her friends and a sexy plumber, and I consider it one of my smartest book buys of 2012. I loved the book. I laughed so loudly that my family asked me to share the joke. When I saw A Slight Change of Plan on NetGalley, I eagerly requested the privilege of reviewing it, another smart decision. A Slight Change of Plan is a worthy follow-up to Better Off Without Him.

I think anyone with a sense of humor will enjoy this book, but I think it resonates particularly with women old enough to have their own fund of mixed memories, hard-earned experience, and reservoirs of love for all the family and friends and lovers, old and new, who own a piece of their hearts.

Often I found myself pausing to reread a sentence or a page. Sometimes the pause was to extend the moment of laughter, but more often it was to luxuriate in the feeling that I was sharing something special. The novel is written in first person, and so all that the reader knows is filtered through Kate’s voice.  For some readers that may present a problem, but it is not one for me. I love the intimacy of the first-person point of view. It gave me the feeling that Kate was a person I knew well and liked a great deal and the feeling that Ernst is an author who knows and understands the life I have lived, the lives my friends have lived.

When Kate is clearing her house before moving, she finds that she has to dump some stuff.

I had to get rid of records. I had LPs dating back to the sixties—did you know that Sally Field released an album as the Flying Nun? Some of these were harder to get rid of than others, but, as Jeff pointed out, I had already downloaded everything of importance into my little MP3 player. Since I could now listen to every Dan Fogelberg song ever recorded without having to get up and flip anything over, out went the vinyl. Books were also a bit of a problem. So I just got rid of all of Adam’s and kept mine.

Kate was more disciplined that I. I tossed Sally Field, but I kept my Beatles albums on vinyl. I refuse to count the Dan Fogelberg songs on my playlists. And I almost never got the books packed because I kept stopping to reread favorite bits from various ones.

Then there’s the passage where Kate talks about her Real True Love, the one who left her. Her words struck what Faulkner called the “resonant strings of remembering.”

He was the one.

You never ever loved another man the way you loved him. And when it was over, he broke your heart like it would never be broken again.

Then there are the passages that just make me laugh. For example, this conversation between Kate and her best friend:

“This menopause thing is killing me. Just when I think my libido has taken a permanent vacation, it comes roaring back, and suddenly I miss sex. God, an orgasm is one of life’s few pleasures that isn’t harmful or illegal.”

Cheryl arched an eyebrow. “Don’t need a man for one of those,” she said.

“I know. But I’m tired of naming my vibrators so I have someone to thank.”

If you like romantic comedy that makes you laugh and smile and think and remember, I highly recommend A Slight Change of Plan. If you like it as much as I did, you can still get a digital copy of Better Off Without Him at a very reasonable price. And I’m wondering what’s next from Dee Ernst.

Do you like first person point of view in fiction? Or are you a reader who has a decided preference for third person stories?

Tuesday Review: The Wishing Thread

The Wishing Thread

By Lisa Van Allen

Publisher: Ballantine

Release Day: 

September 3, 2013

Aubrey Van Ripper has known since girlhood that she bore the responsibility to carry on the generations-old tradition of knitting magic into the scarves, sweaters, and other items sold in the Stitchery, the family shop in Tarrytown, New York, next door to Sleepy Hollow. Aubrey and her sisters were taught the family craft by their Aunt Mariah. Bitsy, the oldest sister, rejected the very idea of magic and turned her back on the superstition and poverty of life in the Stitchery. Her goal is to see that her children have a safe and normal life. Meggie, the youngest sister, also flees at the first opportunity and became a wanderer in search of her mother.  When Mariah has a fatal heart attack in the middle of a fight to save the Stitchery and its environs from those who want to destroy the neighborhood to make way for a mall, the sisters discover that their aunt has left the Stitchery with its long history and its tower of sacrificed treasures to all of them. Bitsy and Meggie want to sell it, a move that Aubrey vehemently opposes.

Each of the sisters is engaged in her own journey that includes coming to terms with her past, accepting the self she is in the process of becoming, and reconciling the bonds and tensions that are unique to sisters, but it is Aubrey’s story that lies at the heart of the book. Her aloneness even in the face of the abiding love she shares with her sisters and her best friend is tempered by her developing relationship with Vic Olivera, a Tappan Square neighbor who becomes her ally in the fight to save their neighborhood and a man who sees past her reputation and defenses to love who Aubrey truly is. But will the heritage that Aubrey is committed to preserving require the sacrifice of the relationship that offers her the greatest happiness she has known?

The Wishing Thread is a mix of women’s fiction and romance with touches of magical realism. The characters capture the reader’s interest and affections, and the story teases the reader with the question of what is real and what is magic.

From the Great Book in the Hall: There is, of course, always a question—a question of the difference between what is real and what is true. A thing can be true without being real. You may not grasp this entirely, but don’t worry. This is the nature of faith, of magic, of art, of a good life’s work: If you ever understand perfectly what you are doing, you should stop right away.

Van Allen’s use of knitting as real craft, as magic, and as metaphor has particular resonance given the role needlecraft has played in women’s history. Her prose has a lovely lyricism that I found greatly appealing. If you are a fan of writers such as Alice Hoffman and Sarah Addison Allen, I predict you will enjoy this book as much as I did.

I find fascinating the fusion of the real and the fantastic that is central to magical realism, but I know some readers dislike it, as reactions to some of Lisa Kleypas’s Friday Harbor books attest. What do you think?  

Tuesday Review: Rose Harbor in Bloom

Rose Harbor in Bloom

By Debbie Macomber

Publisher: Random House/Ballantine

Release: August 13, 2013

Debbie Macomber carries readers back to Rose Harbor Inn for the second book that combines new characters, including the inn’s owner, Jo Marie Rose, with a familiar setting, Cedar Cove, and occasional appearances by beloved characters from the original Cedar Cove series. The widowed Jo Marie, although still grieving for her husband Paul, who was killed in Afghanistan, is finding peace and a new sense of purpose in welcoming guests to her inn. She feels a real sense of satisfaction in setting in place the just-finished sign that announces the inn’s new name and Jo Marie as proprietor.

She is less satisfied with the state of her rose garden, which she had hoped to have ready by the time she held an open house to introduce Rose Harbor Inn to the Cedar Cove community, but she has learned that curmudgeonly handyman Mark Taylor moves at his own pace, even though it is considerably slower than Jo Marie likes. With all the inn’s rooms booked for guests who will soon be arriving and the open house scheduled for Sunday, Jo Marie doesn’t have much time to worry when Mark quits when they have an argument.

The first of her guests to arrive is Mary Smith, a businesswoman from New York, whose clear exhaustion and the scarf covering her hair loss identify her as a cancer patient. Mary left the Seattle area nineteen years ago, and without her brush with mortality, she might never have returned. She made the trip against the advice of her oncologist, but she feels a compelling need to reconnect with her past, a part of that past is in Cedar Cove and a part of it is still in Seattle.

Most of Jo Marie’s guests are in Cedar Cove to celebrate the fiftieth wedding anniversary of Julie and Kent Shivers. The Shivers’s granddaughter, party planner Annie Newton, is the family member charged with managing the details of the celebration. Annie, who is recovering from a broken engagement to a man who proved to be self-absorbed and unfaithful, finds it comforting to plan this celebration for her grandparents who have been in love for half a century. But the couple who has always seemed the essence of marital happiness to Annie seems more interested in bickering and sniping at each other than in celebrating their five decades of marriage. As if that were not disturbing enough, there is also the presence of Oliver Sutton, her grandparents’ neighbor, the bane of her existence when they were growing up. Oliver is eager for a cease fire to their hostilities, but Annie can’t forget the past.

The necessity of coming to terms with one’s past is the theme that connects all the stories in this novel. Mary must forgive herself and accept the things that cannot be changed and own the courage to embrace the joy that life still offers. Annie must forgive youthful folly and see Oliver with new eyes, recognizing that he is not the tormenter of her young years or the fiancé who betrayed her. Even Jo Marie proves to have issues with the past and with her acceptance of Paul’s death.

As always Debbie Macomber gives her readers characters who stumble and make mistakes but who learn to forgive, to love, and eventually to acquire the grace to accept life’s bounty with open hands and grateful hearts. Macomber’s readers can trust her to bring more such characters to Rose Harbor Inn to heal and to grow. Jo Marie’s story will continue to develop, the mysteries of Mark Taylor will slowly unravel, and Cedar Cove will continue to offer readers a place where peace is possible and even strangers find it feels like home.

If you require high-pressure adventure, sizzling sexy scenes, or intellectual puzzles in all you read, Debbie Macomber is not the author for you. On the other hand, if you enjoy a heartwarming, comfortable world where community is real, where people actively care for one another, and where kisses supply all the sexual passion, Debbie Macomber is among the best at creating such a world. I read all thirteen Cedar Cove books, and I, for one, am glad the Rose Harbor series allows me to return to the Cedar Cove world. I look forward to the next book in the Rose Harbor series. In the meantime, I’ll be watching Hallmark’s Cedar Cove TV series, and I almost never watch TV.

Are you a Debbie Macomber fan? What’s your favorite Macomber book? Have you watched the Cedar Cove TV series?

Super Tuesday and Tuesday Review

  

July 30 will be another Super Tuesday for Romance Readers with a stack of incredibly good books being released that day. I sang the praises of one of those releases at Heroes and Heartbreakers today: Why Dukes Say I Do by Manda Collins. Beginning today and continuing through Friday, I will review a July 30 release at Just Janga. Last week, I reviewed three—Love and Other Scandals by Caroline Linden, Three Little Words by Susan Mallery, and Home to Whiskey Creek by Brenda Novak. Sometimes soon, The Romance Dish will publish my reviews of Some Like it Hot by Susan Andersen and The Devil and Clan Sinclair by Karen Ranney. To celebrate this super week of releases, the Randomizer will pick one commenter from this week’s post (North America only) to receive a free copy—Kindle or print—of Why Dukes Say I Do and one other of these July 30 releases (reader’s choice).

Now for the regularly scheduled Tuesday Review!

Sanctuary Island

By Lily Everett

Publisher: St. Martin’s Press

Release Date: July 30, 2013

Ella Preston is reluctantly accompanying her younger sister Merry to Sanctuary Island, a thinly populated island off the Virginia coast that serves as a refuge for wild horses. The free-spirited Merry is eager to reconcile with their estranged mother, Jo Ellen Hollister, a recovering alcoholic. Ella has no desire for reconciliation with the mother she hasn’t seen since their father divorced her and took the girls away when Ella was thirteen. Three years younger than Ella, Merry may remember less clearly than Ella what life with an alcoholic parent was like, but Ella hasn’t forgotten. Therapy may have helped her forgive her mother, but it didn’t make her want Jo Ellen in her life. But since impulsive Merry is going to Sanctuary Island, so is Ella, who has spent most of her life looking after Merry.

It’s not only wild horses who find sanctuary on Sanctuary Island. It proved a refuge for Grady Wilkes when he returned after one of his search and rescue missions literally blew up leaving him with grievous injuries that have left him still scarred physically and psychically five years later. Grady owes a lot to Jo Ellen whose contribution to his recovery was crucial and who has continued to be a mother figure in his life. He’s not about to stand by idly while the two daughters who have refused to have anything to do with their mother for fifteen years turn up to take advantage of her just as she come into an inheritance.

The open-hearted Merry and Jo Ellen reconnect immediately. Merry feels at home on the island and as her mother’s daughter. Ella is far more complicated, and even as she slowly comes to recognize that Jo Ellen is not the woman she has imagined, she clings to the past and to the anger she denies but cannot eradicate. She also discovers that Grady is more complex and vulnerable that her early conclusions about him suggested. As these two wounded people grow closer, their power to heal one another grows clearer. But they can embrace the future only if they can trust one another enough to let go of the emotional baggage they carry from their pasts.

I enjoyed Louisa Edwards’s Recipe for Love books, and even after reading the billionaire Harrington brothers novellas that served to introduce Sanctuary Island to readers, I wasn’t sure why Louisa Edwards was now writing as Lily Everett. Sure, there was a major change in setting, but she was still writing contemporary romance. Her stories were still a mix of humor, hurt, and heat. I understood better after reading Sanctuary Island, which has the definite feel of a romance/ women’s fiction hybrid. Ella’s journey to self-knowledge and self-acceptance are key to the story, but this fact does not lessen the power of the romance. In fact, there’s a love scene that I’d rank very high on the tenderness, heart-melting scale.

Ella and Grady’s story is richly emotional and rewardingly intricate. Despite Ella’s time in therapy, she is still very much the adult child of an alcoholic. Her need to be in control, her heightened sense of responsibility, her difficulty in letting go and just having fun, and, most of all, her difficulty separating the past from the present are all classic symptoms. She felt so real to me that I found it easy to understand and forgive her stubbornness and her carefully maintained distance from her mother. I fell in love with Grady from the start. His loyalty, his courage, and his ongoing struggles with the consequences—physical and emotional--of his injuries gave him depth and credibility. Without taking any respect away from military heroes, I was also pleased that his injuries were sustained in a different manner. As the recent deaths in Colorado surely reminded us, heroes wear a lot of different uniforms, and some even dress as civilians.

Although the romance is central to the story, Ella’s relationship with Jo Ellen is equally important. Truly forgiving her mother, not merely giving lip service to the idea, is an essential step in Ella’s ability to become healthy enough to give and receive love. Everett does an excellent job of giving both relationships their due.  Jo Ellen too is a great character. Her love for her daughters is evident as are the regrets she lives with and her need to accept herself as worthy of a second chance, not just with her daughters but with a full life.

The Billionaire Brothers novellas are fun reads, and I think contemporary romance fans will enjoy them. But Sanctuary Island is something more than a good read. It has substance and heart, and it leaves the reader thinking about connections and disconnections and forgiveness and healing as well as happy endings. I highly recommend it. 

I adored Merry and her curmudgeon match. Their story, Shoreline Drive (January 28, 2014) is already available for preorder.

I confess that I’m a great fan of romance/women’s fiction hybrid novels. Many of my favorites fall in this group. Are you a fan, or do you prefer your genres unmixed.

Tuesday Review: The Lemon Orchard

The Lemon Orchard

By Luanne Rice

Publisher: Penguin Group Viking/

Pamela Dorman Books

Release Date: July 2, 2013

The life of Julia Hughes, an adjunct professor of cultural anthropology at Yale University, essentially stopped five years ago when her sixteen-year-old daughter, Jenny, was killed in an automobile accident in which Julia’s husband also died. Although Julia grieves for her husband Peter, they were on the verge of divorce when he was killed. It is the loss of her only child that has left her emotionally paralyzed, unable to return to her life, isolating herself in the east coast home with her memories and Bonnie, a twelve-year-old blue merle Border Collie, the only living thing that connects Julia with Jenny.

Julia accepts the invitation of her uncle John Riley, a professor of Mexican Studies at UCLA, and his actress wife Graciela to house-sit for them at their home in Malibu, California, while they are in Ireland. Julia had visited Casa Riley often, but this is her first visit in five years. Except for an occasional dinner with Lion Cushing, an aging actor who is almost family to Julia, her visit to California changes little about her life except the location—until Julia learns the story of Roberto Rodriguez.  

Roberto is the manager of the Rileys’ lemon orchard. A Mexican who entered the country illegally, Roberto also lost a daughter five years ago. He and his six-year-old daughter left his hometown in Mexico to find a better life in the United States. In the desert where so many Mexicans die as they attempt an illegal crossing, Roberto left Rosa in the shade of a rock while he looked for the ride that had been arranged for them. But he was captured by the Border Patrol, and by the time he persuaded someone to look for Rosa, there was no trace of her. For five years, Roberto has worked hard, haunted by his memories of Rosa and her angel doll, Maria, and wondering if his child is dead or if she has somehow been saved.

As Julia and Roberto share the stories of their losses, a bond forms that develops into a rare friendship and then into a love affair. Julia uses her skills as an anthropologist to generate a plan to find out what happened to Rosa. A former professor connects her to an anthropologist who works for an organization dedicated to reuniting families of Latino immigrants whether it is a literal reunion or, as is more commonly the case, provides them with information and remains to bury. She contacts Jack Leary, a retired Border Patrol agent who gave orders for the search for Rosa, and he is persuaded to join in the hunt. As Julia’s quest to restore Rosa to her father moves closer to resolution, so does the improbable relationship between Julia and Roberto.

The Lemon Orchard resonates with the themes of love and loss and family dynamics that have characterized her work since her debut novel Angels All Over Town in 1985. The Southern California setting from the wealthy Hollywood world of Lion Cushing to the beauty of the lemon orchard to the Latino neighborhood of East LA grounds this story that moves between a love story between two people whose shared loss is greater than their considerable differences of ethnicity, class, and education and a harrowing look at the all too real problems of illegal immigration.

The characters are engaging, the plot is compelling, and the emotional stakes are high. The use of multiple points of view allows the reader to believe in a relationship that otherwise would demand credulity, and the use of flashbacks keeps the devastating losses Julia and Roberto suffered as fresh for the reader as they remain for the characters. Including Jack Leary’s perspective allows Rice to add balance and keep a human face on the Border Patrol. It also allows her to include fascinating details such as the existence of the Shadow Wolves, Native American trackers who use traditional skills of their people in contemporary situations. I confess to being confused sometimes by the purpose of Lion Cushing’s point of view.

Readers who have enjoyed other novels by Rice will find this one a welcome addition. The novel plays to her strengths and centers on a social issue rarely addresses in popular fiction. Romance readers who may be unfamiliar with Rice’s books should take note that The Lemon Orchard is not a romance. The romantic element is strong and central, but there is no conventional HEA. If Rice were a romance author, readers could count on a sequel, but although Rice has written several connected books, including the six-book Hubbard’s Point series, most of her more than thirty novels are standalones. While my favorite Rice novels continue to be three from 2000-2001—Follow the Stars Home, Dream Country, and Summer Light, I have no hesitancy in recommending The Lemon Orchard to readers who enjoy women’s fiction with a strong romantic element but don’t require a neatly beribboned HEA.

Do you require an HEA for everything you read? Should every love story end happily?

Tuesday Review: Somewhere Between Luck and Trust

Somewhere Between Luck and Trust

By Emilie Richards

Publisher: Harlequin Mira

Release Date: June 25, 2013

Twenty-two-year-old Cristy Haviland is about to be released from The North Carolina Correctional Institution for Women, where she has just served eight months on a contrived shoplifting charge. Her future looks anything but promising. She is struggling with making the right decision about the son to whom she gave birth during her imprisonment. Michael, the son whom she has never held, is being loved and cared for by a cousin of Cristy’s.  She is afraid to go back to Berle, her hometown, because her son’s father is there. Cristy is grateful but wary that Samantha Ferguson, the director of a maternal-health clinic in Ashville, has taken an interest in her and is offering her a place to stay at Goddess House, a log cabin located between two small mountain towns, Luck and Trust.

Ironically, luck and trust are two qualities in short supply in Cristy’s life. There’s little in her past to foster a belief in either quality even before the prison sentence. The daughter of a legalistic preacher and his ineffectual wife who set standards their daughter could never meet and withheld their love and approval when she failed, Christy was ripe pickings for Jackson Ford, the spoiled and superficial charmer who won her with his attention and used her for his own twisted purpose.

While Christy is adjusting to her freedom, discovering who she is, and finding answers to the questions she has about her new life, one of the directors of Goddess House is searching for answers about her distant past. Georgia Ferguson, Samantha’s mother, is an innovative educator currently employed as the principal of an alternative school. Georgia is the once famous “Sweatshirt Baby,” so tagged by the media because as a new born she was found wrapped in a University of Georgia sweatshirt and abandoned in a hospital sink, a preemie who almost didn’t survive. Now newspaper clippings about her birth and a charm bracelet have mysteriously appeared on her desk. Their appearance just as she is approaching her fiftieth birthday leave Georgia wondering about the mother who abandoned her even as she deals with the challenges of her troubled students.

As different as the two women are in most ways, a connection develops. Georgia, who has extensive training in the teaching of reading, recognizes that Cristy is illiterate. Given the young woman’s obvious intelligence and social skills, Georgia determines that the problem is a form of dyslexia and offers to teach Cristy to read. Afraid of just one more failure, Cristy is at first reluctant but eventually accepts Georgia’s offer. As they work together, their respect for one another deepens and a friendship develops. When Georgia decides to unlock the mystery of her past, Cristy is one of the friends with her every step of her journey.

Emilie Richards packs this second book in her Goddesses Anonymous series with elements drawn from a variety of genres and a bundle of social issues. Somewhere Between Luck and Trust is most clearly women’s fiction, but both the mystery and romance threads are strong. In addition to the mystery of Georgia’s beginnings, there is the mystery of the setup that sent Cristy to prison. Both mysteries are solved but not without some twists along the way. Romance is provided for both women as well. Jim “Sully” Sullivan, a young cop from Berle who has a strong sense of justice and high courage, becomes Cristy’s champion and earns his place in her heart. Lucas Ramsey, a mystery writer with a soft spot for a troubled teen, sneaks past Georgia’s reservations about romantic relationships with his genuine charm and caring.

The social issues woven into the story include rehabilitation, adoption, child abandonment, literacy, education, acceptance of homosexuality, the evolving definition of family, and I may have missed one or more. The result of so many issues could easily have been a confusing, tangled mess of threads or a sociological treatise, but in the deft hands of Richards, it is neither. She is a gifted storyteller, and she weaves this complicated mix into a compelling, coherent, variegated whole that captures the reader’s interest, touches her heart, and challenges her preconceptions. And she does all this while making the North Carolina setting so real you can feel the sun’s heat and touch the earth of Cristy’s garden.

Readers of One Mountain Away will enjoy learning more about Georgia and seeing Samantha and other characters from the first book make appearances and appreciate seeing Charlotte’s legacy come alive, but Somewhere Between Luck and Trust can also be read as a standalone. If you appreciate novels, regardless of marketing tags, that ate cogent, compassionate, and courageous, I highly recommend this one.

I sometimes think we pay too much attention to putting books into simple categories. While I will always love undiluted romance, I also find that some of my favorite books defy simple labels. How do you feel about books our need to separate books by genre or subgenre?