One Good Book Deserves Another

Genre: Contemporary Romance
Series: Country Roads, Book 2
Rating: 1 Star
Length: 400 Pages
Formats: Paperback, Kindle
Disclosure: An ARC of this book was provided to me by Forever publisher Grand Central Publishing/Hachette Book Group via NetGalley. This rating, review, and all included thoughts and comments are my own.




Small town baker Grace King has loved her big brother's best friend Jaxson Anderson since she was a kid. Problem is, Jax has always treated her like a younger sister, protective and caring. That's great and all, but Grace is no longer a child and her feelings for Jax are anything but immature. He's her one and only. He just doesn't know it. Yet.

As a sheriff in the small Gulf Coast town of Mirabelle, Florida, Jax Anderson sees a broad spectrum of the worst in human nature. It's nothing he hasn't seen before, though, considering his violently abusive, drunken father and utterly disinterested mother. If it weren't for the King family, he probably wouldn't have made it as far as he has. And that's why he's always known he's not good enough for his best friend's little sister, Grace, no matter that he can't remember a time when he didn't want her.

He was doing an admirable job of ignoring the want until that accident that almost cost her her life. Since then Jax has been struggling with his control, haunted by what-ifs. Surely that's the only reason he totally snaps his chain with the woman when she pushes his buttons, wrenching the last shred of control out of his hands with a maelstrom of passion. He still knows he doesn't deserve Grace. Still has no doubt she will realize that eventually and leave him. But maybe, just maybe, he can have a little grace in his life before she does.


I really enjoyed Richard's first book in this series, Undone, and I couldn't wait to get my hands on Jax and Grace's story. That's why it kills me to say that so many things went wrong for me in this one that Undeniable left me...well...undone. From the characters, who I found largely intolerable, to the story, which wavered between boring and extremely frustrating, to the writing, which made me a little nuts in several places, there were just too many things that pushed all the wrong buttons.

The long-suffering, self-sacrificing martyr character type never works for me, and Jax rode the, "We can't be together because I'm not good enough for you," horse until it keeled over dead. It was a refrain that popped up so many times I lost patience with him even before I reached the halfway point of the book.

Honestly, I could never figure out why he was so down on himself. Sure, he has a horrible set of parents and his childhood was traumatic, but only parts of it, because the King family and others took care of him and showed him what love was all about - a fact that is also stressed several times throughout the narrative. He's now a well respected member of the community, has good friends, a good life, and money enough in his pockets to buy his own home. So...not really seeing any real motivation for the I'm-no-good self image. It didn't endear me to him at all. Mostly I just wanted to kick him.

I wish I could say I liked Grace more, but I didn't. Her desperation for Jax and the subsequent heartbroken angst after every single time he pulled the push-me-pull-you act on her was very off-putting. And really, more than once would have been too much, but the number of times she went back to him in a blink after his demons reared their oft-seen heads and he treated her like Kleenex yet again was ridiculous.

Not for nothing, but any man alludes to me as a whore - in public no less - and I don't care how much I love him, he's not going to be climbing back into my bed with just a weak-ass apology. Not without missing a few of his favorite appendages first, anyways. The fact that Grace just accepted his apologies with very little confrontation every time and cozied right back up to the guy didn't make me think too highly of her level of self respect.

Had I liked the main characters more maybe I wouldn't have been so disappointed with the plot of the story, but I was bored through most of it. There were a couple of threads of interest, however. I liked Grace's friend Preston. He had a nice ancillary storyline that added poignancy to the read. I also liked seeing Paige and Brendan again. I love them.

On the other hand, the town biddy was up to her old tricks. I just wish someone would make her a victim of a tragic underwater basket-weaving accident or something, because that bat has to go. She's more than a source of conflict, she's an utterly reprehensible, barely human being and I can't for the life of me figure out why someone hasn't at least sued her for slander. The fact that her behavior continues unchecked is really rubbing me the wrong way. As do the town's bad apples, the trio of terror. They're so over the top ugly that I struggle to believe that their behavior has gone unchecked for so long.

There was an anemic mystery thread surrounding a rash of robberies in town that could have been better developed and incorporated into the storyline, as well. It wasn't a bad idea, but as it was written, it just seemed contrived to put the characters in the position they were in at the climax of the book, and that bothered me. For that matter, I couldn't figure out why what happened in the climax suddenly wakes Jax up when what happened at the end of the previous book didn't seem to.

I wasn't thrilled with the narrative itself, either. It was over-burdened by way too much superfluous information and description. It seemed at times that every single element of a scene was described in minute and unnecessary detail and every ancillary character who was given so much as a mention had their life story and connection to the town detailed to the extreme. And there are a lot of characters mentioned. After a while it all became white noise, and it drowned out the stuff that could have really added to the narrative and the storyline.

There are just too many things about this book that either fell short or didn't work for me. I really enjoyed the first book, so I'm hoping that this was just not a good fit for my reading preferences. I'm not ready to give up on this series just yet. There's obviously something brewing between Grace's friend Mel and Jax's friend Bennett, who caught my eye in the first book. I'm sincerely hoping, though, that Bennett acquits himself better than Jax did here.

Genre: Contemporary Romance
Series: Country Roads, Book 1
Rating: 4 Stars
Length: 368 Pages
Formats: Paperback, Kindle
Disclosure: An ARC of this book was provided to me by Forever Yours publisher Grand Central Publishing/Hachette Book Group via NetGalley. This rating, review, and all included thoughts and comments are my own.





Paige Morrison hasn't had the best day...er...well, week...no, it's more like...oh, hell. The past year of her life has pretty much sucked.

She lost her job with an advertising agency in Philadelphia, lost her roommate (and best friend) to a swank job in DC, lost her apartment because she couldn't make the rent alone, temporarily moved in with her boyfriend until she got back on her feet, then got dumped before she got the chance. Forced to leave Philly just to survive, she ended up at her parents' home in the small town of Mirabelle, FL, where for the past three months she's found nothing but closed, prejudiced minds and tightly sealed doors, so no job and no friends there either.

Then, to add insult to the injury of a particularly humiliating interview with the town's resident gossipy, venomous hag, her Jeep dies, stranding her on the side of a very hot, very dusty road to nowhere. Yeah, she's definitely had better years.

Hey, at least her mechanic is hot.

Brendan King has heard of Paige Morrison. Everyone has. He's even seen her jogging around town a few times. Her call for a tow, though, is the first chance he has to see her up close or talk to her. Turns out that's probably a good thing, seeing as how just five minutes with the gorgeous, smart-mouthed, quick-witted, and so obviously down-on-her-luck woman completely rocks Brendan's world to the point where he doesn't know if he'll ever recover. Or if he even wants to.

She's the best thing he's ever had happen to his life, but Paige is a city girl, and Brendan is right where he belongs in the small town of Mirabelle. The problem may not be so much getting the girl as it is keeping her, but some risks the heart just has to take.


I have a few confessions to make. First, I absolutely love romances that have a guy so totally gone over a girl that he's endearingly goofy with it. It's totally sappy of me, I know, and I'm probably ruining my tough-girl cred (I have tough-girl cred...really...I swear. Oh, hush.) but for some reason that sort of over-the-moon-for-a-girl guy just really pushes my Happy Reader buttons, and Brendan was exactly such a guy from the moment he meets Paige. I loved it. I loved him.

I also have to confess that sometimes, just sometimes, no other sort of book will do for me but a light, fluffy, relatively complications-free romance. They're the cotton candy of what I refer to as brain candy reads; airy, not a lot of substance, really, but still so damn sweet and tasty. When I started this book, that type of cotton candy romance was exactly what I needed to cleanse my mental palate after several weightier, less happy reads. For most of this book, I was in reader heaven.

Brendan was by far my favorite character, but I liked Paige, too. Their romance was the sort of cute, fun, slow-buildup (relatively), almost idyllic romantic tale that doesn't come around all that often any more. There was sex, but not before they had been seeing each other for months, and the arc of their romance stretched all the way through a wedding and beyond. Definitely not something you read every day.

While the narrative lacked a measure of sophistication in a lot of ways and the writing style, most notably in the descriptive passages, sometimes read like bullet points, there was plenty of southern small-town goodness to balance it out. There was also a nice number of secondary characters with tons of personality if not definition, and the setup for the next book in the series, Jax and Grace's book, was well done.

The plot wasn't complex. External conflicts were mostly annoyances and relationship conflicts were few and far between. Personal conflicts and emotional baggage didn't come into play all that often, either, even when it would have been more realistic if they had. Occasionally that made the romance arc feel a little saccharine and made the book seem a little long, especially as I reached the last quarter of the story. I also had some minor issues with the timeline, which starts out with a nice day-to-day pace but has some awkward transitions when the timeline starts jumping forward by months. Nothing too bad, but enough to notice and pull me out of the story a bit.

To be honest, a staple diet of this sort of romance would drive me a little batty, but in small doses, it's just what my reading doctor ordered. For me it was a feel good, guilt-free pleasure read with a totally adorable romantic hero and an eminently likable heroine. It was also my first read of a Shannon Richard book, but given how I'm dying to get my hands on Jax and Grace's story, I can pretty much say with certainty it won't be my last. After all, a girl's gotta have just a little bit of cotton candy every once in awhile.