I’m way too old to have read Cabot’s Princess Diary books, but glad I’m old enough to enjoy her contemporary romance. Despite its rom-com cover, No Judgments, though often droll, tackles sombre issues for its protagonist and narrator, Sabrina “Bree” Beckham. Bree has divided her life between when-she-was-Sabrina and lived in Manhattan as a law student with a famous mom and a trust fund and, at present, Bree, living humbly in Florida’s fictional Little Bridge Island, waitress, art-dabbler, and cat owner. (Indeed, Bree’s imperious former-shelter-cat Gary is one of the most charming of the island’s denizens, feline, canine, or human.) But darker events than law-school-dropping-out brought Bree to Florida: her ex-boyfriend’s betrayal, oh, not with another woman, but by excusing his best friend’s execrable behaviour, behaviour that left Bree with uncertainty, fear, and mistrust. But there’s one man who breaks through her wariness, sexy Drew Hartwell, her bosses’ nephew and resident renovation-king-and-heartthrob. When Hurricane Marilyn bears down on Little Bridge Island, Drew and Bree, despite their initial banterish dislike (which we always know masks healthy-lust-like), work together to ensure evacuees’ left-behind animals are cared for, while falling into love and between Drew’s bed-sheets.
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Tag: Florida-Set
MINI-REVIEW: Beatriz Williams’s THE GOLDEN HOUR
“I damned well won’t run around Nassau going to parties while my husband rots away in the middle of Nazi Germany.”
Beatriz Williams’s irrepressible heroine declares early in The Golden Hour and sets the tone and theme of a story spanning continents, political interests, and historical whirlwinds, but centering on love for the ages, love of country and of a man for a woman. Through two wars, intrigue, evil, characters buoy above history’s indifferent, raging waters. Williams writes about pre-Great-War Elfriede, a German beauty married to a German baron, who’s sent to a Swiss asylum to recover from what we’d recognize as post-partum depression. There, she meets the love of her life, a recovering British army officer, Wilfred Thorpe. And Lulu, a seemingly amoral American lady-columnist, adrift in 1940s Nassau, embroiled in the goings-on surrounding the cadaverously odious Windsors.
Though work left me only a reader’s lament of two to three pages of reading before nightly-stupor set in, Williams’s tale had me in thrall for weeks, working its magic to carry me, amidst teacherly tasks, to a golden-light-bathed crescendo of an HEA-conclusion. (more…)
MINI-REVIEW: Jenny Holiday’s THREE LITTLE WORDS
Honestly, folks, I’m scared to take a reading-breath, I’ve had SUCH a run of great books since New Year’s and Holiday’s Three Little Words gets on that list too. Not that I’m complaining, but as an introvert and pessimist, I do wonder: when will the reading ball drop?
So, Holiday’s #3 of Bridesmaids Behaving Badly: I wasn’t super-keen going in because, while I enjoyed #2, it didn’t rock my world. I liked it well enough and I especially liked Holiday’s smooth, easy-as-pie prose. There were also intriguing little moments with Gia Gallo, one of the quarto of girlfriends that make up Holiday’s series and this is Gia’s story and the intriguing Cajun chef in whose restaurant heroine Wendy and hero Noah dine in It Takes Two. Gia is gorgeous, a model, and a mess when it comes to food. She’s got a problem with it. In Three Little Words, we learn that, at days-away from 30, her body isn’t doing the skinny-model thing it used to and Gia’s having trouble coming to terms. Groomed from girlhood to compete in the pageant circuit, Gia doesn’t know what else she can be, what else she can do. She puts her existential crisis on hiatus at the novel’s start, however, because she‘s on her way to deliver her friend’s, Wendy’s, wedding dress to her Pink Palace Florida wedding. With a fitting scheduled, Gia has to get there ASAP. (more…)
REVIEW: Emma Barry and Genevieve Turner’s FREE FALL
Emma Barry and Genevieve Turner write one of my favourite historical romance series and Free Fall is their fifth story in it. I love that it’s set in the 1960s, a decade I was born into, but don’t remember much of … other than a vague black-and-white memory of MamaB, in bouffant hair, sitting on the coffee table, smoking, and weeping over Bobby Kennedy’s assassination flickering on our tiny, bunny-eared TV. Barry and Turner’s series avoids America’s many ’60s tragedies and focusses instead on the American race to space. Their novels are peopled with astronauts, space scientists and engineers, and Jello-mold-making wives. There is one marvelous female engineer heroine and her grumpy second, Parsons, the scowling engineer who makes an appearance in this present volume. To us, living in these bizarre times, and without the ’60s’ take-to-the-streets ethos, Barry and Turner give their novels a setting that feels like a more innocent, less fraught one. Yet, just around the corner are the women’s movement that will change the genre and us forever and the loss of whatever hope and possibility our American neighbours wrought in Camelot. What I really liked about Free Fall, by way of introduction, is how it’s a domestic novel and more focussed on the heroine’s growth. Vivian Grace “Vivy” Muller is loud, brash, colourful, big in every way, physically, in her laugh, walk, and taste for “bouffant hair” and “winged eyeliner”: “She laughed too loudly, and she did more than wink at boys, and she was always losing her gloves.” (more…)
REVIEW: Priscilla Oliveras’s RESORT TO LOVE
Priscilla Oliveras is a new-to-me contemporary romance author and one I’d heard good stuff about from romance-reading Twitter friends. I was happy to add her title to my TBR and appreciated what she had on offer: as Oliveras herself self-identifies on her bio, a “Latinx” heroine, Sofía Vargas.
Resort To Love opens with the hero’s, Nathan Hamilton III’s, arrival at the now-defunct, dilapidated, Floridian Paradise Key Resort, where he and Sofía fell in love, consummated their love, and set a path to an on-again, off-again romance through their college and early-career years. Sofia hasn’t seen Nat in two years, but the sight of him sets her immediately back in their high-school sweetheart days and everything their love entailed, especially as illicit “cross-class romance”: “Their forbidden romance – him in management, her a summer employee – had heightened their adolescent hormones.” Sofía is beset by memories and feelings, but her primary emotions are grief (she’s recently lost a friend), anxiety, and anger. On his part, Nathan too is overcome by tidal waves of desire and love, but he’s also hurt from Sofía’s rejection: “It’d been two years since they’d been together. Two years since she told him not to contact her again.” There be reasons! (more…)
REVIEW: Liz Talley’s PERFECTLY CHARMING
Liz Talley’s Perfectly Charming is her second Montlake-published Morning Glory novel. Talley used to write great Super-romance for Harlequin. While Miss Bates loved Talley’s Harlequin work, the first Morning Glory, Mississippi, novel was shrug-worthy. But Talley is a strong enough writer to convince MissB. to give the series another try. The series premise is an interesting, though conventional one. Three childhood friends lose #4 in their tight, supportive circle to cancer. Lucy leaves a charm bracelet and wish for each with enough money attached that each heroine can have an adventure, take a chance, and make a change in her life. When her life has taken its turn, she passes the bracelet on. Jessica Culpepper, Perfectly Charming‘s heroine, has already had her life turned upside down when the novel opens. Her “American Dream” existence, the cheerleader who married the wealthy high school football star and had a white-picket fence life, ended in divorce when Benton slept with the florist and told Jess their marriage no longer fulfilled him. Jess’s world crashed, but Lucy’s legacy allows her to leave her loving Morning Glory family and friends, to take a nursing job in Pensacola. Now a year after the divorce, Jess has healed and Florida is the final step in making her psychic cure complete. (more…)
Miss Bates Reads Romance 