THE SUMMER COTTAGE by Annie Rains

  

Publisher: Forever
Date Published: May 25, 2021  
ISBN#   978-1538703427
Contemporary Romance
Reviewed by Gina (myreviewbooks@aol.com)
Obtained via publisher

2-1/2 Hearts

Trish Langly needed a new start on life for her and her son. Disgusted with her now ex-husband for the financial scam he ran bilking his victims of millions of dollars she could no longer remain in her town of Sweetwater Springs. When she saw an ad for a property manager in Somerset she jumped at the chance. For the most part her job is ideal and while she hasn’t exactly gone out and about town, she’s enjoying the safety and security she’s found there.

Jake Fletcher left Somerset years before hoping to run from the grief of the love of his life dying. Now, years later, he’s ready to leave a thriving law practice and join his family in Florida. First though he has a stop to make.  At the behests of his parents and their siblings they have determined it is time for his grandmother, Vi, to sell her cottages at Somerset Lake.

Selling her cottages is not what Vi wants for herself. In fact, that’s why she hired Trisha. With Trisha, Vi and Jake at cross purposes for their futures, only one can come out the winner. Or, can everyone have what they most need and want?

I hadn’t read Annie Rains before but the blurbs on her stories sound so good. This one looked like it was going to be a sit down and sigh with pleasure beach read. It wasn’t the most awful book. There were parts that were pretty good reading. For the most part the writing came across pretty juvenile. I wondered if maybe a teen daughter or relative wrote it at different points. There was just no emotion to the story. I didn’t feel there was any chemistry between Jake and Trisha and aside from stowing away in Jake’s plane, Petey was just a too good to be true seven year old.

That said, it is actually an ideal read to introduce a teen to romance. It’s about respecting boundaries, respecting people, especially women. It’s about caring for not only family, but those around us.

This is an objective review and not an endorsement of this book.

 

                                                                           

SWEET LOVE by Lauren Accardo

 

Publisher:      ‎Berkley
Published:      January 25, 2022
ISBN:      ‎ ‎ 978-0593200339
Genre:     Contemporary Romance
Format:     Print from Publisher
Reviewed by name and email address:  Gina  myreviewbooks@aol.com

TWO-1/2 HEARTS

Bethany Jones, aka, Bee, is a rescuer. No, not your EMT type rescuer. More like she saves people from financial debt, broken relationships and losing their homes. She has a big heart but at the same time feels little. She can’t because if she does she’ll break. Her parents long ago gave up on her brother, Isaac and with his latest fiasco she’s spent the money she spent years saving to embark on the career of her dreams. Does he thank her? No he asks for more. When in a moment of giving into flight instead of fight, she heads to Pine Lake, New York and her friend Syd just to get away for awhile. There she meets Denny Torres.

Denny is your basic major hottie. But he doesn’t have the ego that you might expect. He’s made some decisions his family and some friends haven’t agreed with. He himself came to Pine Lake not long ago and fell in love with the town. He has a big house with basically nothing in it—a statement of how he feels about his life – empty. When he meets Bee though, something shifts inside of him and maybe, just maybe, he’s found a direction. At least he might have found a new friend and just in time because his parents are on their way to visit and he needs his house set up in style.

Bee considers the interior design job Denny needs done—she plans to earn her commission and then she’s off to that design school she’s spent a lifetime dreaming of. Or is she?

Can two people with different goals taking them to different places let their hearts lead?

I really enjoyed the first two books in Lauren Accardo’s Adirondacks series. WILD LOVE was a good read, SWEET LOVE, book 2 was even better. I couldn’t put either one down the stories were so good. The third book, BOLD LOVE, was a let down for me. I felt like she bit off more than she could chew and tried to hit too many bases at once. That’s sad because in reading her notes at the end, this one was the one that was the nearest and dearest to her own heart. Maybe that personal involvement in it was what got in the way of a good story.

I liked Denny and Bee in and of themselves. They were good characters, although the way Denny was portrayed in WILD LOVE was a lot savvier and emotionally stronger than the Denny I saw in BOLD LOVE. When Bee was seen as a strong character she was great. When she was her brother’s doormat it didn’t work for me. I did enjoy the updates as it were, of the characters from the earlier books.  I get it that Accardo married into an amazing family and wanted to show case some of the characteristics she loves best about them. I saw that in Denny. I couldn’t stand Isaac and his redemption seemed forced to me. It didn’t work.

What didn’t work for me was the go nowhere storylines about her gay roommates and the teen sexual identity issues. She touched on them, tried to do a good job presenting the conflicts those individuals go through, but it came across mainly like she was told she needed to write a GLBT or teen sexual crisis type book. It didn’t move the story along, I wasn’t interested in it and it fell flat.

In her closing notes Accardo says that this is the last book of the series. I hope not. Pine Ridge might be a small town, but even small towns have lots of good stories to tell.  What about Karen and Yuri? Why not write a story about an older couple who are finding love after their spouses are gone and children raised? With how Accardo dealt with alcoholism and other life issues in the first two books I think she’d do a fantastic job in a book about Karen and Yuri and the issues they face as seniors. Beyond them, again, even a small town has its share of stories. Pine Ridge is a great location to tell them.

 

This is an objective review and not an endorsement of this book.

 

DEATH IN THE FAMILY by Tessa Wegert

Publisher:      Berkley 

Published:      February 18, 2020

ISBN:      978-0593097892

Genre:     Suspense      

Format:     Print from Publisher

Reviewed by name and email address:  Gina  myreviewbooks@aol.com

TWO-1/2 HEARTS

 

After almost losing her job Shana Merchant has moved to the remote town of Thousand Islands in upstate New York with her fiancé, Carson.  There, despite Carson’s advice and wishes, she joins the local police department.  In the sleepy town the most Shana can expect is a few parking tickets or the occasional bar fight…at least that is what she is told.  But one morning she, and her partner, Tim receive a call reporting a missing person on the private island of Tern. With a nor-easterner bearing down on the area, Shana and Tim head out to Tern.  When they arrive they find the Sinclair family.  Wealthy, long time owners of the island and a famed fabric company in New York’s garment district.  They also find that the missing person may be a murder victim.  With only the family and its long time caretaker on the island Shana and Tim are in a race against time to find the killer.

The blurb for Tessa Wegert’s DEATH IN THE FAMILY sounded so good.  I’m a huge fan of locked room mysteries be it in a room like Agatha Christie or an island like Anne Cleeves.  I couldn’t wait to see how Wegert handled it.  She handled the “locked room” aspect fine for the most part.  The rest, not so much.

There are two other threads through the story that were disappointing.  Wegert had a great opportunity to have told three separate, well done stories instead of intermingle the three, two of them weak.  From the beginning of the book I felt like I’d been dropped in the middle of the story.  I looked to see if there was a prequel to see what happened between Shana and Bram – there wasn’t.  We don’t learn what happened until 2/3 into the story and then it isn’t even really all that clear.  Shana tells us how what he did caused her to doubt herself, sort of, but we aren’t really all that clear on the details.  By the end of the book I wasn’t all that sure if he’d been caught or not.

The other weak thread was Cameron, the fiancé.  I admit, given his personality and what we learn about him he might have been the killer but generally, aside from his special way of undermining Shana I’m not sure why he was in the story.  She could have moved to Thousand Islands for any other reasons side from her engagement to him.  Her situation with Carson could have been an entirely separate story with him as a true perpetrator.  If his and Bram’s sections were there to boost word count, then tell a longer story like what Karen Rose does – she tells a complete story where you know where you are from the beginning and not wondering if you missed a prequel. 

The ending was a little hard to figure out because Wegert uses that horrible first person present tense that, as I’ve said before, reads like a non-English speaking second grader writing a paper for school while trying to learn the language.  That technique ruins an otherwise decent read.  In this case, as long as I stuck to the closed room aspect, it was a decent read.  If that part of the book hadn’t been a good read I would have rated this book a 1-1/2 or a 2.  I don’t see myself continuing with the series.

This is an objective review and not an endorsement of this book.

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THE BAR HARBOR RETIREMENT HOME FOR FAMOUS WRITERS by Terri-Lynne DeFino

Publisher:     William Morrow

Published:     June 12, 2018

ISBN:        978-0062742674

Genre:      Women’s Fiction

Format:     Print

Obtained via:  Publisher

Reviewed by name and email address:  Gina  myreviewbooks@aol.com

TWO-1/2 HEARTS

 

Decades ago Cornelius Traeger came up with an idea for a very special retirement home.  A place where a special group of people – writers who create or put to pen the dreams of others, who create new worlds, exciting adventures and take their readers to a different time and place, could retire in peace and comfort among their own.  He also created it for what was perhaps his greatest love—Alfonse Carducci—who came only long after Taeger’s death and at the end of his own days. 

The Bar Harbor Retirement Home is more than a haven for famous authors.  It is a place of security and hope for the staff that work there.  Foremost among them is Cecibel.  A young woman with a sad past who finds her happiness in the writings of others, most particularly her personal hero, Alfonse Carducci.  When Alfonse arrives her world changes in ways she never imagined.  It gives her the courage to explore her own world, her personal demons and to find love.

I really wanted to not just like, but love Terri-Lynne DeFino’s THE BAR HARBOR RETIREMENT HOME FOR FAMOUS WRITERS.  I set my expectations too high.  Cecibel is a wonderful character who is buried in the author’s repetition of her being a “monster” due to a tragic accident that happened years ago.  Over and over she raises how Cecibel looks, how she hides how she looks, how she suffers from her past.  I got it the first twenty times—I didn’t need to be reminded on pretty much every page that takes place in the present.

The book alternates back and from between the 1950’s and 1999.  I’m seeing more and more of those back and forth between time period books and I personally find them jarring.  For me they don’t create a cliff hanger feeling of what is to come next—they mostly break up the story so I have to go back to the original time period to pick it up again.  What I’ve begun to do in those cases is I read all the earlier time periods and then move on to the next time period so the story reads chronologically for me.  If they’re done as flashbacks that’s fine.  But the bouncing back and forth is distracting. 

I loved the idea of a place for authors, famous or otherwise to retire together.  And I really loved the idea of four old friends writing one last book, together, a story told from each of their own characters. 

The book is worth a look if you are a dedicated reader.

This is an objective review and not an endorsement of this book.

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