#TBRChallenge 2024: When Somebody Loves You

The Book: When Somebody Loves You by Shirley Jump

The Particulars: Contemporary romance, Berkley, 2015, first book in The Southern Belle Book Club series (that didn't survive past this book and one novella), out of print, available in digital

Why Was it In Wendy's TBR?: I've read and liked Jump's books in the past. My print copy isn't autographed (so I didn't get it at a conference) and looks pristine, which means either I bought it new or the publisher sent it to me 🤷‍♀️

The Review: I zipped through this book in roughly 24 hours but in all honesty it's because I started skimming chunks of it.  It's not bad per se, it's just...flat. Very flat. I kept thinking this would have been a stronger romance had a lot of the single title series fluff been dispatched and the author wrote this story for Harlequin Special Edition instead.

Elizabeth Palmer is finally shooting her shot. A Jersey girl, she was raised by a single mother who was big on dreams but short on practicality. Her childhood was being shuttled from one dreary "new" apartment to the next and taking over paying the bills by age 8. Naturally this childhood had Elizabeth going in the complete opposite direction - she's exceedingly practical. She has a boring job as a bookkeeper and a boyfriend who just threw her over for one of their neighbors. When her boss takes away the one part of her job she doesn't hate (writing the company newsletter) she realizes life is passing her by. After hundreds of rejections she finally gets a freelance gig to write an article for a horse magazine.  Her subject is Hunter McCoy, a quarter horse breeder whose ranch had fallen on hard times but is slowly rising from the ashes.  His aunt tells Elizabeth to come on down to Georgia, she thinks the publicity will be great!  Hunter though, he takes one look at Elizabeth in her slacks and silky blouse and hates the idea.

Hunter is a hero who is all about the work.  Yes, the ranch was in serious trouble - his father having almost run it into the ground. The ranch is in Hunter's blood, his family having lived on the land for generations and his grandfather starting the horse breeding operation. That's not the only reason Hunter is all about work though. No, he's a man still struggling after a tragedy claimed the life of his fiancée two years ago, and naturally he's got a heaping dose of guilt over that. He takes one look at Elizabeth and falls back into the same bad habits - which is he keeps trying to push her away.  Little does he know, Elizabeth needs this interview, she needs this job, and no surly cowboy is going to deter her from living her dreams.

We all know what happens next. A quick day-trip turns into several thanks to a bad storm (that naturally lands Elizabeth staying in Hunter's sprawling ranch house) and Hunter's uncooperative attitude. These two are drawn to each other immediately but resist: Hunter because baggage and Elizabeth because this is her first freelance gig and she's not about to fall into bed with her subject. Talk about unprofessional! 

Surrounding our couple are a myriad of secondary characters there to prime the series pump: the group of women who are members of the The Southern Belle Book Club who meet in the small, local bookstore.  Hunter's aunt Barbara Jean, who raised him and his sister after their mother died, a ranch hand, Carlos, sweet on Barbara Jean, and Hunter's 18-year-old sister, Amberlee, who wants to be a horse trainer but has severe asthma triggered by horses and stamps her foot a lot because she's not a baby anymore and she's tired of being treated like one! (Look, it's never good when a series is killed before it's finished but I can't say I'm sad that Amberlee never got her own romance because Good Lord I wanted to smack her every time she was on page).

The world building is good and not all the secondary characters are duds, so what's the problem?  Well, the romance. Hunter and Elizabeth are just so....flat.  They never feel fully realized. They never transcended the page for me. Their back stories are certainly interesting but I never really got how they fell in love other than there was an attraction right away that they both were determined to ignore. It's Insta-Lust that turns into Insta-Love. As a couple they're just both sorta....there.

It's the kind of book I'd DNF out of boredom, not because I'm vehemently hating it. In the end I couldn't help thinking that if the series "stuff" would have been dispatched, if more time had been spent in the pockets of Elizabeth and Hunter as individuals and as a couple - this would have been stronger in category romance form.

Final Grade = C

The Sweetheart Bargain

I figure Romancelandia needs another small town contemporary series like the proverbial hole-in-the-head.  While I'll admit to gorging myself on my fair share of small towns in category romance, the single title trend of endless series set in cutesy-wootsy small towns where every meddlesome busy-body is all up in your business has largely eluded me.  Too many words, too many pages, too much filler about said small town shenanigans and not enough focus on why I'm reading romance in the first place.  Uh, that would be for the romance.

But books like The Sweetheart Bargain by Shirley Jump may just get me to change my mind.  Certainly it helps that this is the first in a series.  It also helps tremendously that, while the author infuses this story with plenty of elements to make small-town-contemporary fans happy, she also includes some darker issues.  Think of it as Angst, With A Candy-Coated Shell.

Olivia Linscott's life is going nowhere in Boston, what with her dead-end job and fresh off the heels of a divorce.  So when she finds out she's inherited a cute little bungalow in Rescue Bay, Florida?  She goes looking for a fresh start, and some answers.  Having always known she was adopted, Olivia is left the house by her birth mother.  However, it's a bit of a rude welcome when she gets there.  The house looks nothing like the picture the lawyer showed her, which is to say it's one step away from falling down around her.  Then there's her surly next-door-neighbor.  Sure the man puts the hunk in hunky, but he's also a bit of an ogre.

Luke Winslow was a Coast Guard pilot until a blown mission, a dead BFF, and an eye injury grounded him permanently.  He's not fit for human companionship, haunted by his friend's death and reeling from the fact that his life, as he knows it, is over.  He'll never fly again, and flying is all Luke knows.  Now there's this pretty slip of a woman moving in next door, asking him to help her find a stray dog that is injured, and mucking up his big plans for endless mopey solitude.  If that weren't enough?  His grandmother seems determined to fix them up.

This story has all the ingredients one would expect from a small town contemporary.  Rescue Bay is quaint, filled with gossiping locals, and conveniently on the beach.  There's Luke's grandmother, and her pack of retirement home friends, that provide comic relief and a couple other main secondary characters like the town veterinarian and a Coast Guard buddy of Luke's that round out the action.

Underneath all that sweetness and light however are some darker issues.  Olivia wants answers from a dead woman who left her a falling down house and no letter explaining why.  Luke's eye injury is devastating, both professional and personally.  Not only is his friend dead, but Luke's career is over.  He's like a babe in the woods, and pricklier than a wounded grizzly bear.  And while Jump does employ the Old Folks As Comic Relief trope, she doesn't fall into the trap of making them One-Dimensionally Wacky.  Greta's advice to her grandson, her love for him, shine through.  She's not just a meddling busy-body, she's made of sterner stuff than that.

The author walks the tightrope between serious and cotton-candy well, keeping the story humming along and never falling too far over the edge to one side.  Luke behaves like a jackass, Olivia stands her ground, but also needs to work through her own issues as well.  If I had any one quibble in this story it would be the almost total absence of Olivia's adoptive parents.  Yes, she talks to her Mom on the phone (a couple of times) over the course of the story - but I guess I expected Olivia's mission to bother her a bit more.  But then, the author needs to keep the story focused and moving along, and wasn't I just the one complaining about "filler" in the first paragraph of this review?  Oh yeah, I was.

It's light, it's fun, but it's got a nice core of angst to keep things from descending into saccharine territory.  The Sweetheart Bargain didn't change my life, but I inhaled it in two sittings; no small feat these days thanks to work slowly sucking away my will to live.  If you dig small town contemporaries, this is a good one.  And even if you don't?  Yeah, this is still a good one.

Final Grade = B

Review: One Day To Find A Husband

I was once chatting with a category romance writer whose books my mother enjoys.  I told her Mom finished her latest book in two hours.  I asked her, "Is that demoralizing?  That a book you worked hard on is inhaled in such a short time period?"  Her answer was no.  She said it was actually a very high compliment because it meant structurally the story worked.  That as a writer, she had "done her job;" not only with the storytelling, but with the mechanics of writing it.  That was exactly my experience with One Day To Find A Husband by Shirley Jump.  Is this book perfect?  No.  Did I have quibbles?  Yes.  Did I still inhale it in two hours?  ::burp::  Excuse me, yes.

Finn McKenna owns his own architectural firm, and is a bit of a golden boy.  Business was booming, he's been profiled in magazines, and buying out two competitors has earned him the nickname of "The Hawk."  However turns out Finn isn't immune to failure.  His last romantic relationship went down in flames after he discovered the woman he was going to propose to was only feigning interest in him in order to woo away clients.  It was a betrayal that stung, and cast a shadow.  Now needing an infusion to his professional reputation, he gets the brilliant idea to propose a temporary partnership with Ellie Winston.  Ellie is an architect who has built her career designing residential homes.  But when her father becomes ill, she agrees to take over his business - which specializes in corporate structures.  They've just landed a job to build a hospital, and Dad's top architect has decided to walk.  Finn proposes that he come in, help her out on this one job, win-win for both them.

Except Ellie doesn't see it that way, and turns him down.  However no sooner does she say no than she hits a snag in her personal life.  She met a woman in China, during her business travels, and they became friends.  When her friend succumbed to cancer, she begged Ellie to adopt her little girl.  Which Ellie is working to do - until she finds out that the Chinese government wants her to be married.  Crap.  What to do, what to do?  Needing to get married in a hurry, loathe to leave Jiao in that orphanage any longer, she agrees to Finn's proposal - on the condition that they get married, in name only, of course.

Naturally what follows is Finn and Ellie tap-dancing around each other, learning they have quite a bit in common, and trying to smother an attraction they figure cannot go anywhere.  Ellie begins to wonder if Finn agreed to her outrageous proposition only to get his hands on her company, and Finn finds himself attracted to Ellie but still a little gun-shy because of the whole traitorous ex thing.  Neither of them has strong parental examples when it comes to committed, fulfilling relationships and both of them aren't really sure what love is, let alone what they're feeling for each other.  Maybe it's just base lust?  Or a mutual attraction because they share similar careers and interests?

Marriage of convenience because of a legal issue, like an adoption, is a non-starter for a lot of readers I know.  It works fairly well for me, if it's a plausible enough reason - and I know enough about foreign adoption (specifically from China) to know that regulations have been tightened up over the last few years.  So I could roll with this bit of conflict.  Finn and Ellie are both likable people, charming and agreeable.  They have just the right amount of baggage to put a few stumbling blocks in their emotional paths, but not so much that they tediously talk in circles.  I'm not entirely sure how they get from liking each other, to falling in love though - and the very short time table doesn't really help matters.  Literally they meet and the next thing the reader knows - they're married.

Still, this was a likable, agreeable story.  It's light, it's fun, it's the kind of story that would make an ideal Lifetime movie.  A quintessential chocolate chip cookie read, it's charming and bubbly - and while it didn't change my life, I'm really pleased that Finn has two sequel-baitin' brothers.

Final Grade = B