
Narrator: Elyse Dinh, Teddy Hamilton
Format: audiobook, ebook
Source: purchased from Amazon
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: contemporary romance, Romance, small town romance
Pages: 299
Length: 9 hours
Published by Montlake Romance on July 23, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads
Willa Lieu-Endicott moved from California to the Pacific Northwest to start over. Since her husband’s death, she’s been struggling to get back her old career as a cookbook ghostwriter. Unfortunately, her latest project—ghostwriting for a viral cooking sensation known more for his washboard abs than his meals—has her stuck.
Until she meets her new neighbor.
Hudson Daws, the handyman next door, lives on a farm with his parents and two adult children. He’s the opposite of everything she’s ever known. His happily chaotic life includes biker barbecues, an escape artist dog, and adorably menacing goats. He’s also got a sinfully sexy smile and a rumbling bass voice that makes her shiver. He inspires her.
From their first meeting, the two fall into an escalating cycle of favors, paybacks…and attraction, even though Willa’s trying to keep her distance.
They both have their own pasts to deal with. Now, they just have to figure out if they have a future.
A delectable rom-com about a widowed cookbook writer and a divorced handyman who find that it’s never too late for a fresh start.
My Review:
Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day, and that seemed like an appropriate occasion for romance books, not just ON the day – although I am – but also the day before, which is today. So here we are. And honestly, as much as I adored the author’s previous book, Role Playing, I couldn’t wait to read this one the minute I discovered it existed.
That’s my story and I’m sticking to it!
But what about this story? From a certain perspective, this is a bit of a typical small-town romance story, where a person from the ‘big city’, whatever that city might be, moves to a small town, falls in love with a local resident, and decides to stay in the new cozy paradise they’ve discovered with their new love.
And this is that story. But it’s so much more, and that’s down to the protagonists, Willa Lieu-Endicott and Hudson Daws. Because they’re not teens or twenty-somethings, and this is far, far, far from being either of their first romantic rodeos. They’re on either side of 45 rather than 25, and they have lives and metric tons of emotional baggage dragging behind them.
Which is what makes this story special.
Hudson is the local, born and raised on tiny Marre Island located somewhere in Puget Sound near Seattle. And it’s where he raised his now-barely-adult twins with the help of his own parents after his wife left Marre for Seattle so long ago that he’s gotten over it even if his kids still resent her, her departure, and the horse she left town on.
But leaving him with the then-toddlers left Hudson putting his own dreams on hold because his kids came first in HIS life if not his ex’s. And he got into the habit of NEVER putting himself first, so his life is content all the way around but not what he’d planned. Or maybe even all of what it could be if he let himself dream. Which he doesn’t.
At least not until Willa moves into the house next door to his family’s farm, and his dog decides he prefers her house to his. A fact that Hudson understands completely from the very beginning.
But Willa has come to Marre just as the knot in the end of her rope begins to unravel. Her beloved great aunt left her the little house, but that loss is the latest in a string of terrible losses. At 46, Willa is a widow. Her husband’s ‘live big’ lifestyle was guaranteed to get anyone sooner or later, but with his diabetes it was definitely sooner. They lived large when he was healthy, but when his health failed they lost their home and their savings and then Willa lost him, too. She had put her own career on hold to live his dreams, but now that’s gone and the pieces are more slippery than she ever thought they would be to pick up.
Her great aunt’s cottage is her only financial asset. The freelance project she is currently working on is her only financial hope, and she’s not at all certain where to turn next.
Which is when she finds Noodle, the dog who just won’t stay home, huddling in her garage in the midst of a thunderstorm. And lightning strikes. Not her house, but her heart. Twice over.
Escape Rating B: In the end, I very much enjoyed this book, but I middled with one hell of a lot of mixed feelings – and I’m still torn about the whole thing and trying to figure out why.
I picked this up because I utterly adored the author’s Role Playing (I also enjoyed her Fandom Hearts series) and wanted more of the same. The geekiness factor wasn’t required, but rather the romance between grown ups with lives that have left scars and the reality of finding love (again) when you’ve been beaten down a bit by life handing you lemons left, right and center with no sugar handy to make them into lemonade in sight.
I also picked this because I wanted to experiment a bit with Kindle Unlimited. I was able to get both the book and the audiobook, and was able to switch between at a whim. So I thought I’d flip back and forth and that’s where I nearly got completely stuck.
Particularly at the beginning, Willa’s head was a very difficult place for me to be in. The story is told in alternating chapters, first Willa, then Hudson, and each in the first person, so we really are inside each of their heads. Willa is just so angst-filled, and so much of her angst is about her lack of support and her programmed inability to reach out for help that I just didn’t want to be that deeply in her mind. It all made sense for where she was at and why it came about, but I felt like I was experiencing it with her to a degree that almost drove me away.
In text, I could just skim that part, but in audio – while driving – that’s a whole lot harder. And I was caught in the dilemma that the narrator felt right for Willa but she perhaps did a bit too good a job of narrating that angst.
I was, very much on the other hand, perfectly happy to listen to Hudson’s narrator to the point where I wouldn’t have minded AT ALL if he’d done the whole book in spite of how wrong that would have been on any number of other levels.
Still, once things started happening, once Willa began to climb out of the rut she’d dug herself into about accepting help when it’s offered and not feeling like she was either taking charity or pity or that she’d be left owing a debt she didn’t want to pay, the pace of the story picked up a lot and I started turning pages faster to see how it would all work out.
Because I knew it would. Willa and Hudson were made for each other, they just needed to get past their own ingrained tendencies and clamber over the pile of emotional baggage they’d each earned along the way. And I really, really needed to make sure that Noodle got HIS happy ever after because he’s such a cute little mischief maker and he did a terrific job playing Cupid for the humans he claimed as his that he earned it.