I just can't. Life is too short to read shitty books, people.

The heroine is that level of TSTL that is just epically painful to read. She goes into the woods in a deserted area, a man pops out of nowhere, yells at her to leave, starts kissing her (yeah, he's not got too many marbles rolling around up there either), has sex with him IN THE WOODS (did I mention they only vaguely knew each other in highschool? And that they exchanged maybe 10 sentences between each other before pants went flying? ), then gets yelled at again, and FREAKING FINALLY gets the hell out of there.

But when she sees him again?

BOOM! Off to the races again.

For real.

And that was only the first, like, 25 pages.

And only the most stupid thing she did.

There was more.

Much more. ( )

Jenny returns for the summer to her small home town after a painful divorce. She caught her Husband cheating on her he said its all her fault she is to boring in bed and to much like a June Cleaver type wife. Jenny meets Mick the boy from the wrong side of town. And they connect. The sex is hot and sizzling seems Jenny isn't June Cleaver when she's with Mick. The story is a heart wrencher and a sizzling romance all rolled into one. ( )

Love this series! What more can I saym this is the second time around or me--how sad is that? ( )

I'm giving this a 4 but it's really a 3.5. The story was good, the H/h were good too, the hot sex scenes were very good. There was just too much narrative some times. I can't handle when a book goes on and on about…..zzzzzzzz……oh, did I doze off there? ( )

I’m going to have to go against the grain here and say I am extremely disappointed with this book. I’d seen it compared to Robyn Carr’s Virgin River series, but - sex scenes aside - it read more as a small town cosy. The first half of the book was so slow I didn’t think I could possibly rate this above one star, but it picked up a bit as the story went on. By the end I enjoyed the story quite a bit, but I had so many issues with this book.

Jenny is a ‘good girl’, and her husband cheated on her, claiming that was the reason he did it. Newly divorced, she returns to her home town and starts having an affair with former town bad boy, Mick. Mick is there in secret and keeping a massive secret of his own that would get him in huge trouble if people found out. This is a fairly simple plot, which is probably why I didn’t enjoy it much. Next to nothing happened, and the relationship between Jenny and Mick consisted solely of him turning up at her door for sex, and then leaving again. It wasn’t enough for me, and after a while I wanted more than sex from the leading couple. A little more plot wouldn’t have been unwelcome either.

The sex was good. There was plenty of it and it was written well. It didn’t quite seem to fit the characters though. I thought Mick’s tragedy was nicely-written and quite emotional, but that only took up a few pages of the book.

There was far too much pondering. After a few pages of introductory pondering, the story started with a bang (of sorts), before dissolving into a good seventy or eighty pages of nothing much happening. Sure, we found out what colour everyone’s clothes were, and got lots of teen-level gossiping between the thirty-something characters, but there wasn’t an actual story. Telling, telling, telling and not one iota of showing. I could have made a drinking game out of how many times we heard about Jenny tingling between her legs and her nipple reactions whenever Mick was within a four hundred-thousand mile radius. And then her father started having groin-tingles about a woman of his own! It was like an erotica author was having a go at writing a conservative story but kept slipping up.

This was one of those annoying small towns, where everyone’s so GOOD. They all go to church and run cute little businesses and wear pearls and twin sets and attend tea parties with all the old biddies. Everybody was offended by things that weren’t offensive, and everyone was so old-fashioned. It was scary, and I couldn’t at all identify with most of the characters in the story.

Jenny wasn’t quite too stupid to live, but she had a few TSTL moments. It’s a common problem for me in these small town romances. All the women are so impossibly naive and GOOD. They do annoying, stupid things that put the hero in jeopardy because they’ve lived such sheltered lives they think their meddling is the best thing to do in any situation. I just can’t identify with them, and quite frankly, I couldn’t see the appeal Jenny had. Why would Mick be so attracted to boring little Jenny in her 1950s outfits? I don’t understand women like that, and I struggled to find anything to latch onto to make me sympathise with such a sheltered, naive character.
It was strange then that all the characters spent so much time discussing their sex lives in disturbing detail. These GOOD women discussing exactly what their lovers do with ice cubes?! It didn’t ring true for the characters. And because there was nothing but sex to the main relationship, all we got in the way of conversation between the friends was rehashing of the sex we’d only just read about. It really dragged.

Both characters became more likeable as the story went on, and in the last third I was invested in their relationship. I only wish there had been more to like in the beginning.

I had some trouble getting into the writing style of this book. We met so many people, and as soon as they came onto the page we learnt the length, colour and style of their hair; what they were wearing and what colour it was; and what they’d been like back in high school. And then we got updates on what they were doing now. There were big information dumps all over the place for no good reason. I don’t ever need to know what colour a minor character’s jacket is! It was especially strange as we didn’t even learn Jenny’s eye colour until about a hundred and fifty pages in. And even then that was the only information we got about her appearance. I simply could not picture her. Was she tall, short, thin, fat, blonde, brunette, pretty, hideous??!! The first mention of her hair came on page 185!! I know things like that shouldn’t matter, but I need something to picture her by!

I wasn’t buying the instant magnetic attraction thing the hero and heroine were supposed to have. They ran into each other in the forest in the dark, weren’t even sure what the other person looked like - two completely different people arguing about trespassing on private property - and we’re supposed to believe from that they’re destined to have wild sex? I just didn’t buy it.

I was really hoping to find this more like Virgin River (minus all the things I hate about that series, like the all the babies and the medical stuff). In fact I was really excited by the possibility of finding a Robyn Carr replacement. But I didn’t find it here. I liked some things about this book, and hold out some hope for the next book in this series - Sugar Creek - as the heroine is a far worldlier and potentially more relatable character. I’d love to find some more contemporary romances set in towns that aren’t populated by such infuriatingly narrow-minded characters, but maybe the next book will be more satisfying in that respect. ( )