One Good Book Deserves Another

Genre: Contemporary Romance
Series: N/A
Rating: 4.5 Stars
Length: 416 Pages
Formats: Mass Market Paperback, Kindle
Disclosure: An ARC of this book was provided to me by HQN Books publisher Harlequin via NetGalley. This rating, review, and all included thoughts and comments are my own.


All Posey Osterhagen had wanted when she was in high school was to be noticed by Liam Murphy. He was the genuine article bad boy with his own motorcycle and an attitude to match. He also worked for her parents at their German restaurant, so she got to see him often. Not that she could screw up the courage to talk to him, though. Not when she was a scrawny girl with stubborn hair and plain features and was so skinny she wore kids pants. Boys pants.

She's older now, though. Wiser. She has her own business she loves, a unique home that's a project-in-waiting, and while she never did grow boobs and still has the body of a twelve-year-old boy, she manages to have a boyfriend...of sorts. Maybe. She's even gotten used to her whacky family, though helping out at the restaurant is often cause for mortification because she has to dress up like a Fräulein on crack.

Which, coincidentally, is exactly what she's doing and what she's wearing when Liam Murphy walks back into her parents' restaurant and smack dab into the middle of her life. So, really, that whole wisdom thing may have been an overly optimistic self examination.

Recently widowed, Liam has moved back to town so his teen-aged daughter can be close to her grandparents. Seeing him again does weird things to Posey's equilibrium. Especially when he keeps calling her by her given name, Cordelia, instead of the nickname everyone else calls her.

She thought she was over him. She should be long over him. She remembers how devastated she had been on the night of her prom, when she overheard him saying some cruel things about her to his friends. Liam Murphy should be no more than a bad memory for her older, not-so-wiser self. Pity he isn't.

Now that he's back, and every single and not-so-single woman in town is throwing themselves at him, Posey can't imagine that he'd give her any more time now than he did all those years ago. Until he does. Then she doesn't know what to think.


Did you have your own Liam Murphy in school? I did. That one guy that even now, years later, sometimes slips into my dreams. I never dated him. I can even say now that it would have been a disaster if I had. He wasn't a bad boy, per se, but he definitely had an aura that was unmistakable. Like he was above the petty high school politics and socialization. That nothing phased him. That he favored who he favored and the rest of the world could kiss it, for all he cared.

It was thrilling to be included in his favor, and for a while, I was. With my silly schoolgirl crush, it mattered to me that the boy who disdained yearbooks, who never had one and refused to sign them, signed mine. That we had classes together and he'd sit next to me. That we had extracurricular activities and there were times we joked with each other.

Stupid, I suppose, to hold those memories close. I still do.

This is a book for all of us, all those souls who loved someone once who didn't think of them that way. For those who would have happily died for just that special smile from the one person that made their hearts pound. Who would still, given the chance, risk much to be loved by that person in return...even in dreams. It's for all of us who have their own Liam Murphys in our past. And it's a wonderful gift.

As a romantic novel, it's just plain fun. Posey is a delightfully neurotic character brimming with a unique vibrancy that makes her irresistible. Liam has his own neurosis, and I adored getting some insight into his thoughts. Higgans hasn't done that before and it worked fabulously in this book. What impressed me most about both of them was that they were adults with realistic insecurities and issues given their histories and they stayed true to themselves throughout the book. Liam didn't suddenly get over the death of his wife, but he had a very real-world grasp on the good and bad in that relationship, he was an overbearing father with OCD issues, and he was just as delightfully messed up at the end as he was in the beginning.

Posey, with her self image issues and inferiority complex when compared to her German diva cousin, was still the perfect little tomboy. She was able to triumph over some of her issues, but it was more about embracing them than putting them aside, and I respected that. It was nice seeing her become more comfortable in her skin.

The story was chock full of charm and quirky characters. The layers of plot threads that comprised the story arc of the book did focus more heavily on the lives of the whacky characters than on the road to romance. While I wasn't thrilled with that fact, I was at least okay with it, because the romance that was there was so very satisfying for me. I could've done without the relentless onslaught of beiber exclamations, though. That got old for me fast. And I was never quite sure if it was some German word I didn't know or if the book had been possessed by Justin's ghost. It was never explained.

This was an absolutely wonderful read. Fans of scorching hot sex scenes may be disappointed, but for fans of well-written story that trends towards the lighter end of chick lit romance with universally relatable characters, this is one to be adored. I do wish the romance thread had a larger impact on the tale, but what was there was wonderful...and given my personal history with my own version of Liam, also cathartic.

Quotables:

God grant me the courage to date the men who aren't idiots, the wisdom to accept the fact that many men are idiots, and the wisdom to know the difference.

Genre: Contemporary Romance
Series: N/A
Rating: 4 Stars
Length: 382 Pages
Formats: Mass Market Paperback, Kindle


What happens if you meet The One, that one person you know you'll love for the rest of your life, your other half, your soul mate...and you're not ready? You can't handle it, for whatever reason? You're not sure you even want it? Harper James met Nick Lowery when she was in college. He walked up to her at a bar on her twentieth birthday and informed her she was his future wife, the future mother of his children, and then set his mind to convincing her that he was right. The damnable misery of it all was that she loved him more than life, needed him more than air, and was so terrified of commitment and all that it represented, so emotionally crippled by her abandonment issues, that love wasn't nearly enough. Their marriage didn't last a year.

The pain of that failure lasted far, far longer.

Now on the cusp of her thirty-fourth birthday, Harper is a successful divorce lawyer on Martha's Vineyard. Apropos, really, given her cynicism about the institution in general and love in particular. She's in the process of popping the question to her boyfriend of two and a half years when a phone call from her younger sister shakes Harper down to her foundations. Willa getting married for the third time is bad enough, but it's the fact that she's marrying Nick's half-brother that really rips her guts out. She'll be seeing Nick again at the wedding.

As Harper gets closer and closer to the age her mother Linda was when she abandoned Harper and her father, and she sees Nick again after all those years apart, Harper starts to realize that a volcano of terrifying emotions and conflicting motivations is erupting in her. And love is the mother of all of them. If she's not very careful it will flow over her heart and soul and leave nothing but scorched real estate where her life used to be.

Nick has always been her greatest weakness, and maybe, just maybe there are such a things as second chances and new beginnings. If Harper can just believe.

Powerfully written with a flowing, descriptive narrative and three dimensional characters, My One and Only evokes a lot of emotion as it tells the tale of Harper James and her rocky past with the only man she's ever loved. Told in first person perspective from Harper's point of view, Higgins drops you into her lead character's head and wrings you dry as she details in sometimes brutal clarity Harper's fears, flaws, and foibles on her twisted path to happiness.

Nick was a great guy with his own flaws, but far more appealing a character, as at his core he was a simple man who fell in love, recognized it for what it was, and lost it before his wisdom caught up with his talent and intelligence. Some of his quiet admissions and honest emotional expression to Harper just killed me. It was heartbreaking, really, just how awful their relationship ended when they loved each other so much - if maybe not always smartly or carefully.

Unfortunately, despite the artistry of the writing and the well developed plot that evolved in a slow, steady, realistic fashion, I found Harper's persistent cynicism, negativity, and smug certainty to be largely unsympathetic and difficult to like. I can completely sympathize with the thirteen-year-old who lost her mother on her birthday, who took a scared stepsister under her wing and mothered her. I have no sympathy at all for the thirty-three year old woman who proposes to her Peter Pan complex-having mutton head boyfriend because she doesn't love him enough to scare her, with a list in hand of things she plans to have him agree to do before they wed. And I have difficulty respecting a character who is so terrified of being left by someone she loves she closes herself off from everyone and would rather break hearts than work things out maturely.

Reading about the stuff going on in Harper's head, finding out her past with Nick and how it all got wrecked, disturbed me. It was all just so tragic and sad, so understandable, so easy to see the reasons, and so frustrating because she never did anything about the reasons, just ran from the results. Even knowing that as a romance there would be some HEA in this book, there was just too much of Harper that depressed me. I wasn't able to love the story as much as the excellent writing, solid plot, loveable secondary and ancillary characters (including Coco), and romantic leading man would normally dictate.

I loved the end, though. Truly did. It was a little easy to see coming, and a few of the character confrontations with Harper were a little cliched, but I did enjoy it. I just wish the resolution and Harper's evolution had started a lot earlier in the book, some self awareness coming a bit sooner. As it is, it's a book that I think is very well written, but for my tastes, the heroine is too depressing to be thoroughly entertaining. I will say this, though, I admired and appreciated the style of writing to such a degree that I'll be looking for other books from Kristan Higgins in hopes of finding one with a little less emotionally stunted main character.

Disclosure: This book was provided to me free of charge through the Amazon.com Vine program for the purpose of an honest review. All thoughts, comments, and ratings are my own.