I was reading another book and it hit a highly dramatic bit, and I was not in the mood for it. So, I pivoted to the next book on the physical pile on my end table and thus, Let’s Give ‘Em Pumpkin to Talk About became my Sunday read (and my Cannonball book). I’m glad it was because this romance featuring the human equivalents of an over-eager golden retriever and a reticent to trust black cat was exactly the wavelength I was on.
Sadie Fox agreed to come home to Pea Blossom, Indiana, to care for her father’s beloved pumpkin farm while he tends to his brother in Florida. She’s been away for over a decade, making a life for herself as a textile artist in California. She and her father have been barely on speaking terms for most of that time, but she’s interested in starting to heal that gap and agreeing to two months in Pea Blossom, taking care of the family farm, and growing a winning gigantic pumpkin for the local fair contest is a way to do that. But, when she arrives, she finds the family pumpkin patch destroyed and her reluctant hopes along with them.
Enter Josh Thatcher, her father’s neighbor and a tech guy who traded in the rat race for growing gourds, including experimental squash hybrids. Josh is immediately struck by Sadie, so different from himself with her sweary, tattooed, all black wearing self. There is something building between them but with increasing disasters and a built-in end date to Sadie’s time in Pea Blossom they must decide what is worth pursuing and what is better left behind.
This is Isabelle Popp’s debut, and I was impressed with the quality of her world-building. Popp takes the conceit of a person returning to a town they haven’t been to in over a decade and uses it to allow the reader to set expectations based on Sadie’s memory and then presented the changes to flesh out the story world, allowing an easy way for the reader to know right off the bat that this was going to be a story about how places and people defy expectations. Because in this book both Sadie and Josh are convinced that they are too much and unlovable and are working towards finding the things in life that can bring them joy, and their budding romance is part of that – but not the whole.
There were some uneven parts, and moments when I would turn the page back and forth to make sure I hadn’t skipped one, but Popp overall does a great job of writing rich characters who have the hots for each other and seeing where it all lands.