It’s been a while. Not because I haven’t been reading, but trying to write an internal audit assessment and changing jobs made me avoid writing much else in the last few months. So a mad dash to document what i have read.
Starting with this one. It’s a later entry into the Lucky Harbour series- a romance series set around a small seaside town in the Pacific Northwest with a high concentration of beautiful people getting together.
This one features Becca, a travelling young woman with secrets who stops in Lucky Harbour for a few months (this is a favoured trope of Jill Shalvis) and Sam, a former foster child and oil rigger who runs a marine charter company with two friends.
Becca gets busted sneaking peeps at Sam from her sketchy warehouse apartment. After a disastrous evening as a waitress she ends up as the marine charter administration person, which she is very effective at.
This is a romance, I have told you about the two main characters, sparks fly, but there are complications. The working together, her back history, his back history.
Over all it is fairly light, but her back story has some disturbing moments. There are definitely some sex scenes, on the detailed side, which made reading this on a crowded bus/train a bit awkward.
It’s an enjoyable read overall, light and fast, but still has some emotional weight. I found that the resolution of the issues was quite speedy at the end (a lifetimes worth of issues resolved in a couple of conversations) and the most disturbing part of the backstory was not fully addressed (the perpetrator died off screen before the story began in a non-related incident).
I have been a bit flighty in book selection of late, so have to think about why i finished this in one hit. Partially timing- a day off just after Christmas in the heat of a QLD summer meant we headed to the beach. So a nice light read for the trip. Partially, I do enjoy romance as a genre. It is predictable in the sense the reader knows the destination, so the journey is the point- how do we reach the end goal? And I find i am more persnickety about that journey- i need to be sold on why these two end up together. This book did manage that- their chemistry is evident and the way in which they work together is also important- they back each other up. Points dinged for the very easy resolution to other conflicts.
