Life is a mixed bag for Piper Calloway.

On the one hand, she’s a twenty-nine-year-old VP at her dad’s multibillion-dollar real estate development firm, and living the high single life with her two best friends in a swanky downtown penthouse. On the other hand, she’s considered a pair of sexy legs in a male-dominated world and constantly has to prove her worth. Plus she’s stuck seeing her narcissistic ex-fiancé—a fellow VP—on the other side of her glass office wall every day.

Things get exponentially more complicated for Piper when she runs into Kyle Miller—the handsome new security guard at Calloway Group, and coincidentally the first love of her life.

The guy she hasn’t seen or heard from since they were summer camp counselors together. The guy from the wrong side of the tracks. The guy who apparently doesn’t even remember her name.

Piper may be a high-powered businesswoman now, but she soon realizes that her schoolgirl crush is still alive and strong, and crippling her concentration. What’s more, despite Kyle’s distant attitude, she’s convinced their reunion isn’t at all coincidental, and that his feelings for her still run deep. And she’s determined to make him admit to them, no matter the consequences.

From the host of NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast comes a heartfelt debut about the unlikely relationship between a young woman who’s lost her husband and a major league pitcher who’s lost his game.

In a sleepy seaside town in Maine, recently widowed Eveleth “Evvie” Drake rarely leaves her large, painfully empty house nearly a year after her husband’s death in a car crash. Everyone in town, even her best friend, Andy, thinks grief keeps her locked inside, and Evvie doesn’t correct them.

Meanwhile, in New York City, Dean Tenney, former Major League pitcher and Andy’s childhood best friend, is wrestling with what miserable athletes living out their worst nightmares call the “yips”: he can’t throw straight anymore, and, even worse, he can’t figure out why. As the media storm heats up, an invitation from Andy to stay in Maine seems like the perfect chance to hit the reset button on Dean’s future.

When he moves into an apartment at the back of Evvie’s house, the two make a deal: Dean won’t ask about Evvie’s late husband, and Evvie won’t ask about Dean’s baseball career. Rules, though, have a funny way of being broken—and what starts as an unexpected friendship soon turns into something more. To move forward, Evvie and Dean will have to reckon with their pasts—the friendships they’ve damaged, the secrets they’ve kept—but in life, as in baseball, there’s always a chance—up until the last out.

A joyful, hilarious, and hope-filled debut, Evvie Drake Starts Over will have you cheering for the two most unlikely comebacks of the year—and will leave you wanting more from Linda Holmes.

You know this isn’t going to be your typical romance when the story starts out with Evvie packing up her car to leave her husband but she is interrupted when notified that he has been in, what turns out to be, a fatal car crash. So we know she wasn’t as happily married as everyone, including her best friend Andy, seems to think. Evvie, it turns out, is quite the skilled liar.

But this isn’t an unreliable narrator story. Instead, it is the awakening of a young woman with a troubled marriage behind her. It is also the story of a washed up baseball player who has gained national infamy as having some sort of psychological breakdown. They end up hiding out together, becoming good friends and eventually fall in love. But there are a lot of bumps along the way.

As I was reading this, I was reminded of another book I read recently, The Flatshare by Beth O’Leary. The women have similar relationship issues and these books are both romantic comedies, this one American, the O’Leary, British. They are both very good reads.

There are some really funny, laugh out loud moments here, as well as a few times I found myself in tears, making this an emotional read for sure. The small town in Maine is presented as almost another quirky character and that worked for me. If you like humor with your romance, and I certainly do, put this on your “must read” list!

7/19 Stacy Alesi, AKA the BookBitch™

EVVIE DRAKE STARTS OVER by Linda Holmes. Ballantine Books (July 2, 2019). ISBN 978-1524798727. 320p.

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When a single mom becomes an empty nester, she spreads her wings to rediscover herself—and her passions—in this heartwarming novel from #1 New York Times bestselling author Debbie Macomber.
 
Jenna Boltz’s life is at a crossroads. After a messy divorce from her surgeon husband nearly twenty years ago, she raised her two children on her own, juggling motherhood with her beloved job as a Seattle intensive-care nurse. Now that Paul and Allie have gone to college and moved out, Jenna can’t help but wonder what her future holds.

Her best friend, Maureen, is excited for Jenna’s newfound independence. Now is the perfect time to finally book the trip to Paris they’ve been dreaming of since their college days. But when it comes to life’s other great adventure—dating—Jenna still isn’t sure she’s ready to let love in . . . until an unexpected encounter begins to change her mind.

When Jenna’s elderly mother breaks her hip, Dr. Rowan Lancaster saves the day. Despite his silent, stoic exterior, Rowan is immediately smitten with Jenna. And even though Jenna is hesitant about becoming involved with another surgeon, she has to admit that she’s more than a little intrigued. But when Jenna’s children approach her with shocking news, she realizes that she needs to have faith in love and embrace the unexpected—before the life she has always dreamed of passes her by.

Many of Macomber’s books end up as Hallmark movies and I couldn’t help but think about that as I read it, primarily because the main characters were not twenty- or thirty-somethings. They were grown ass women experiencing the empty nest syndrome. I like romances every now and then that remember that older women can fall in love, too. Of course, this being a Macomber book, these are chaste women, despite their ages, life experiences and the fact they have children. And being that one of them is a librarian with little dating experience struck me as being a bad stereotype that I really can’t stand. I am a librarian, so I have strong feelings about this! But since she was recommending books I looked past it and read on.

The story shifts between the two women. Maureen is the librarian who is teased as “Marian the librarian” (if you don’t know that reference, Google is your friend) and Jenna, a nurse. Both are divorced and have been friends since they were girls, helping each other through life’s challenges. That continues here as Jenna’s mother has a bad fall, her son seems to be keeping secrets and her daughter is changing as she is now living on the college campus and is on her own for the first time in her life. Jenna is having a hard time with all of it. Maureen is just having trouble with her attraction to a plumber who likes to read, making her realize she needs to be a bit more open minded. Both are having relationships (finally) and both have a lot of hurdles to get over to make those relationships work. Some of those hurdles were pretty funny, others more serious. The ending was a bit muddy, I would have liked more clarity, but that is a minor quibble.

This is another good read from Macomber and her fans should be very happy with this book.

7/19 Stacy Alesi, AKA the BookBitch™

WINDOW ON THE BAY by Debbie Macomber. Ballantine Books (July 16, 2019). ISBN 978-0399181337. 336p.

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