AUTHOR: KAREN STIVALI
Pages: 207
Date: 09/11/2013
Grade: 4+
Details: Received from Samhain Publishing
Through
NetGalley
Own / Kindle
The blurb:
When love throws you a curve,
swing for the fences.
Parker Wood’s dreams of becoming a
professional baseball player are shattered when he’s injured in a devastating
car crash. After two years in hospitals and physical rehab facilities, he’s
ready to move back to his childhood home and take over the family landscaping
company. The house and business are his, now that his father has passed.
Sophie Vaughn has suffered through
a hellishly public divorce from a husband who couldn’t manage to stay faithful
for two months of marriage. Determined not to let her personal drama impact her
successful wedding and party planning business, she buys her parents’ old
house, hoping the comfort of familiar surroundings will help her heal.
When Parker and Sophie discover
they’re neighbors once again, it’s as if time has stood still. Their friendship
is quickly rekindled, along with the decade-long crush neither of them ever
admitted having. Then the heat between them exposes a long-held secret that
threatens to tear them apart…unless they can detach from their painful pasts
and move forward—together.
Warning: Contains sultry summer
nights, steamy pool-side encounters, and you’ll never look at a jar of peanut
butter the same way again.
====================================================
People following my reviews will know that I do
not like protracted drama. I love it when the characters in a (love)story have
issues they need to deal with. I enjoy the tension a misunderstanding can
create for the characters as well as for the reader. What I have a hard time
reading are books in which the issues aren’t really issues, or where the
problems seem to appear out of nowhere. And what I dislike most are characters
drawing the issues out for chapters on end when just a simple conversation
would have cleared the whole thing up. How wonderful that Karen Stivali managed
to avoid all my pet hates. Yes there was drama, in fact both Parker and Sophie
have issues with trust. But, as the backstory shows, both of them have every
reason to feel insecure, good reasons for having trouble trusting each other.
It was so good to see Sophie and Parker encounter difficulties and deal with
them immediately.
Parker and Sophie felt like real people to me,
the sort of people you might meet and befriend. They are both basically good
and yet there is nothing saintly about them. They aren’t perfect, and are not
described to make them appear as such. They are perfect for each other though just
as they were perfect for this story and perfect for this reader.
There were one or two moments in this book that
made me all warm and happy. When Sophie sees Parker’s scars and he
flinches because he thinks they are ugly to look at, she says:
“I kinda like them...They remind
me that you’re still alive.”
Another moment that really got to me, for a
multitude of reasons I won’t go into right now, was when Parker, Sophie and Joey
are in the garden, just like old times, and Parker says:
“To old friends making new
memories.”
After which Sophie reflects that:
“New memories sounded like a great
idea.”
The whole book is melt worthy, but when Parker
and Sophie danced to “Wonderful Tonight” I was almost reduced to a puddle, that
song being the one the husband and I opened the dancing during our post-wedding
party with.
But the best line in this book was found very
near the end.
“All of that is nothing but the
past. You’re my future. My whole future.”
Now, before anybody thinks that the book I’ve just reviewed is a fluffy and rather chaste run of the mill romance, I’d better add that this is one hot story. The relationship between Parker and Sophie goes from charmingly innocent and insecure to steaming in just a few pages of highly imaginative lovemaking. It is proof of just how wonderful an author Karen Stivali is that she manages to strike exactly the right balance between story and steam. It is good to know that Mrs. Stivali has more books to her name than the two I’ve read by her so far. I can easily see her join ranks with Nora Roberts and become one of my go-to authors when I’m stuck in a (reading) rut or in need of some instant cheering up.
Related review: Decadence
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