After reading Sam and Meghan’s story, I liked Ali enough that I decided to buy her book - the second one in this specific trilogy.
Ali and Flynn were high school sweethearts who broke up when she decided not to leave town with him after high school. Naturally, she was already pregnant (though didn’t know it) and she’s been keeping her daughter’s parentage a secret since then.
Of course, things don’t stay a secret forever…especially not now that Flynn’s back in town for his father’s funeral.
While I liked Ali and the other side characters (especially Meghan) just as much as in the first book, as a whole this book didn’t hold together quite as well for me.
Everything resolved just a little too neatly.
First, Bridget (Ali and Flynn’s daughter) took everything too well.
While not quite as self-contained as Wednesday up there, she accepted being told that her assumed father wasn’t her father and that her actual father wanted to meet her and that her mother had kept it all a secret for seven years…just a little too well. Kids aren’t going to be perfect. This is a fact. So while I totally get not wanting to make the kid’s problems the focus, the possibility that they’ll happen needs to at least be acknowledged.
Second, the ultimate compromise, between Flynn wanting to keep his job as a jet-setting reporter and Ali wanting to keep helping her brother with the family farm, got resolved a little too quickly.
There were also enough missed words/repeated words/small grammar issues that I noticed them. Fixable with a proofreader, but still noticeable.
And unlike the first book, I wasn’t interested enough to go out and buy more in the series, especially not the technical third book, which was…well, the characters who are the stars of that one felt very shoved into this one. The setup was a little too obvious.
So all told, while I ultimately liked the book, I can’t give it more than
Four Stars
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