Author: Meghan Siegler

Quirky isn’t usually my thing, and Annie Hartnett’s latest novel, The Road to Tender Hearts, is most decidedly quirky (just ask Pancakes, the death-predicting cat). The events are bizarre and often tragic, and the characters are eccentric. But at the core of this novel, there is a warmth and genuineness that breaks through its comically dark outer layer.

The story starts with a slew of those bizarre events that ultimately unite main character PJ Halliday, a 63-year-old lottery winner with a long history of drinking and letting people down, with his estranged brother’s young grandchildren, Luna and Ollie.

PJ is not about to let their sudden existence in his life stop him from his latest endeavor, a road trip from his home in Massachusetts to the Tender Hearts Retirement Community in Arizona, where he plans to woo his high-school crush, recently single again after losing her spouse. (PJ learns about that in the newspaper obits, not because he’s been in contact with her, so this visit will be a fun surprise for her.)

Also joining the trip, begrudgingly, is PJ’s 20-something daughter, Sophie, who is simmering with decades’ worth of anger toward her often absent alcoholic father. She has been tasked by her mother — PJ’s ex-wife, Ivy — to take care of him while she is away in Alaska with her fiance, Fred. So Sophie feels obligated to act as babysitter, for Ollie and Luna, and also for her dad.

The motley road-trip crew is rounded out by Pancakes, who has recently wandered into PJ’s life after a stint as a therapy cat at a nursing home.

If PJ were written in any other way, I think I would have hated him as a character. But somehow Hartnett makes me want to root for him. He, pitifully, thinks of Ivy and Fred as his best friends. He goes to their house for breakfast every morning, and he’s devastated when they don’t invite him on their trip.

When Ivy and Fred leave, PJ decides to quit drinking, again.

“PJ had never had a detox as bad as that one, not even when he had to go to prison for six weeks for the drunk driving, but once the detoxing was over, PJ had a new outlook. … When Ivy and Fred got home in September, he could be a new man. He wanted to be a man who was worthy of being their best man. Without the booze, PJ started feeling hopeful.”

It’s kind of hard not to feel for an old man who is so lonely and accepting of his own faults that he settles for being the third wheel in his ex-wife’s relationship. He’s lived his fair share of tragic events, too, which we start to learn more about as the road trip gets underway.

But for every moment or memory of darkness, there is also light, in the form of sweet moments between characters, hope for better things to come and the perfect amount of well-placed fatalistic humor.

Take, for instance, when Pancakes jumps out of a window of the moving car as Sophie and the kids try to track down a missing PJ. Ollie comments that Pancakes is “suicidal without Uncle PJ.” In fact, Pancakes is pulling a Lassie, leading the crew to PJ, who had been hit by a car while walking back to the motel from a bar after having just one drink and deciding he needed to go back to his family. The car was driven, ironically, by the man he’d been chatting with in the bar whose sad story was that he’d killed his wife when driving drunk. PJ survives the accident with minor injuries, but the man does not.

Emotions run high throughout the trip, as PJ battles his own inner demons, Sophie grapples with her dad’s still-not-great behavior and the kids adjust to their new reality as orphans — although Luna is having none of that. She is convinced her real dad is a famous actor who used to live in their town and whom her mom had always said she’d briefly dated. Luna wants to track him down and make him take a paternity test. This would get PJ off the hook as guardian, so he agrees to veer off course for Luna’s heartbreaking endeavor to find a family.

It’s all very sad, but also funny and genuine. The story could have been depressing, but it’s not. The characters are all well-developed and unique, and PJ’s growth feels honest and real. He’s somehow a loveable underdog, despite his constant lapses in judgment.

The Tender Hearts the title is referring to, presumably, is Tender Hearts Retirement Community, as they are literally on the road driving to that destination. But The Road to Tender Hearts could also describe the path PJ is taking to rebuild his heart with compassion and empathy. It could be the softening of Sophie’s heart as she sees her dad trying to be better and do better. It could be the unwitting journey PJ is taking into Ollie and Luna’s tender hearts.

I’m glad I didn’t let my thoughts of “this is so weird” as I read the first few pages stop me from taking this journey with them. A-

Featured Photo: The Ghost Lab by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling

Quirky isn’t usually my thing, and Annie Hartnett’s latest novel, The Road to Tender Hearts, is most decidedly quirky (just ask Pancakes, the death-predicting cat). The events are bizarre and often tragic, and the characters are eccentric. But at the core of this novel, there is a warmth and genuineness that breaks through its comically dark outer layer.

The story starts with a slew of those bizarre events that ultimately unite main character PJ Halliday, a 63-year-old lottery winner with a long history of drinking and letting people down, with his estranged brother’s young grandchildren, Luna and Ollie.

PJ is not about to let their sudden existence in his life stop him from his latest endeavor, a road trip from his home in Massachusetts to the Tender Hearts Retirement Community in Arizona, where he plans to woo his high-school crush, recently single again after losing her spouse. (PJ learns about that in the newspaper obits, not because he’s been in contact with her, so this visit will be a fun surprise for her.)

Also joining the trip, begrudgingly, is PJ’s 20-something daughter, Sophie, who is simmering with decades’ worth of anger toward her often absent alcoholic father. She has been tasked by her mother — PJ’s ex-wife, Ivy — to take care of him while she is away in Alaska with her fiance, Fred. So Sophie feels obligated to act as babysitter, for Ollie and Luna, and also for her dad.

The motley road-trip crew is rounded out by Pancakes, who has recently wandered into PJ’s life after a stint as a therapy cat at a nursing home.

If PJ were written in any other way, I think I would have hated him as a character. But somehow Hartnett makes me want to root for him. He, pitifully, thinks of Ivy and Fred as his best friends. He goes to their house for breakfast every morning, and he’s devastated when they don’t invite him on their trip.

When Ivy and Fred leave, PJ decides to quit drinking, again.

“PJ had never had a detox as bad as that one, not even when he had to go to prison for six weeks for the drunk driving, but once the detoxing was over, PJ had a new outlook. … When Ivy and Fred got home in September, he could be a new man. He wanted to be a man who was worthy of being their best man. Without the booze, PJ started feeling hopeful.”

It’s kind of hard not to feel for an old man who is so lonely and accepting of his own faults that he settles for being the third wheel in his ex-wife’s relationship. He’s lived his fair share of tragic events, too, which we start to learn more about as the road trip gets underway.

But for every moment or memory of darkness, there is also light, in the form of sweet moments between characters, hope for better things to come and the perfect amount of well-placed fatalistic humor.

Take, for instance, when Pancakes jumps out of a window of the moving car as Sophie and the kids try to track down a missing PJ. Ollie comments that Pancakes is “suicidal without Uncle PJ.” In fact, Pancakes is pulling a Lassie, leading the crew to PJ, who had been hit by a car while walking back to the motel from a bar after having just one drink and deciding he needed to go back to his family. The car was driven, ironically, by the man he’d been chatting with in the bar whose sad story was that he’d killed his wife when driving drunk. PJ survives the accident with minor injuries, but the man does not.

Emotions run high throughout the trip, as PJ battles his own inner demons, Sophie grapples with her dad’s still-not-great behavior and the kids adjust to their new reality as orphans — although Luna is having none of that. She is convinced her real dad is a famous actor who used to live in their town and whom her mom had always said she’d briefly dated. Luna wants to track him down and make him take a paternity test. This would get PJ off the hook as guardian, so he agrees to veer off course for Luna’s heartbreaking endeavor to find a family.

It’s all very sad, but also funny and genuine. The story could have been depressing, but it’s not. The characters are all well-developed and unique, and PJ’s growth feels honest and real. He’s somehow a loveable underdog, despite his constant lapses in judgment.

The Tender Hearts the title is referring to, presumably, is Tender Hearts Retirement Community, as they are literally on the road driving to that destination. But The Road to Tender Hearts could also describe the path PJ is taking to rebuild his heart with compassion and empathy. It could be the softening of Sophie’s heart as she sees her dad trying to be better and do better. It could be the unwitting journey PJ is taking into Ollie and Luna’s tender hearts.

I’m glad I didn’t let my thoughts of “this is so weird” as I read the first few pages stop me from taking this journey with them. A-

Featured Photo: The Road To Tender Hearts by Annie Hartnett

The Magnificent Ruins by Nayantara Roy (Algonquin Books, 448 pages)

When I start reading a book that I know I’m going to review I immediately start looking for words, sentences, passages to use as examples of good or bad or mediocre writing. In the first 20 pages of The Magnificent Ruins I wanted to mark up dozens of sentences, meaningful words put together thoughtfully, examples of sharp, witty dialogue.

Nayantara Roy’s debut novel follows Lila De, an Indian American who lives in New York City and is dedicated to her job as an editor at a publishing house. She came to America to live with her dad and stepmom when she was 16, leaving behind her mom and the rest of her extended Lahiri family, and had no plans to return to India.

But that changes when Lila’s grandfather dies and she inherits her family’s crumbling, palace-esque home in Kolkata, India. Upon her return, she’s thrust back into the world of her complicated family, including her mom, who angers quickly and will stop talking to Lila for the smallest of perceived slights, sometimes for months at a time, until her wounds are forgotten and she calls her daughter as if no time has passed.

“The first conversation would be stilted on my end, exuberant on hers. I would revel in a universe where my mother wanted me. Over time, she would begin calling regularly again. Those weeks would inevitably lull me, slightly tipsy from the largesse of her motherhood, into a maternal buzz. And then I would say something that would hurt her feelings, which always meant the punishment of disappearance.”

Her mom, along with her grandmother, aunts, uncles and cousins, all still live in the house Lila has inherited, and none are happy that it’s been left for her — yet they’re genuinely happy to see her. In fact, all of the relationships in the family are messy and complicated, but their love for each other runs deep.

Throughout the book we see the juxtaposition of Lila’s experiences as an American and as an Indian. Before leaving for Kolkata, she visits her dad and stepmom and two half-siblings in Connecticut.

“My siblings were regularly hugged by my father, but he and I had the language of nods and unspoken affections that passed between Indian children born in the ’80s and their fathers. I dreamed of crossing over into the land of effortless holding and kissing that my siblings were citizens of.”

In a more American way, Lila goes to therapy every two weeks, something her family in Kolkata would never understand.

“Therapy felt like a shape-shifting myth across cultures. So acceptable in the Brooklyns and Manhattans of the world that it would be an aberration to not have a therapist, to not have problems. Everyone in New York was ravaged by their love affairs and debt and childhoods, by race and geography and loneliness. In Kolkata, people had fewer problems, because one did not talk about them.”

Those “New York” problems, as it turns out, are alive and rampant in Kolkata. As we meet the Lahiri family, we see these problems unravel slowly: domestic abuse, alcoholism, love affairs and all manner of generational trauma. And Lila isn’t exempt. Along with being a victim of these traumas, she’s at times a perpetrator, engaging, for example, in an affair with a married man — her childhood love, Adil — with seemingly little remorse.

It’s hard to be mad at her, though, given her complicated history with love. She seems to know what she “should” want — namely her American lover, Seth, who is also her star author and whom she openly refuses to commit to. That gets a little messy, though, when Seth comes to Kolkata in an attempt to win her over. (I appreciated that this plot twist supports Lila’s character development and doesn’t feel contrived like similar plot twists in romantic storylines often do.)

There are plenty of other storylines that support Lila’s main character development too, and I had some real feelings — good and bad — for many of Nayantara’s well-developed characters, like Rinki, a friend from Lila’s childhood who serves as a breath of fresh air outside of the Lahiri family.

Within the family, Lila’s grandmother is both loving and terrifying — not unlike Lila’s mom — and the relationship between her mom and grandmother is tenuous. Among other aunts, uncles and cousins, there’s the charming uncle Hari, his subdued wife Mishti, and their daughter Biddy, whose wedding is another plot point and gives the family something to talk about other than what Lila is going to do with the mansion.

Ah, and back to that pesky inheritance. Despite their love for Lila, the family fears betrayal, and Lila is forced to lawyer up to protect what is rightfully hers — even as she herself questions her grandfather’s decision to leave it to her.

The Magnificent Ruins is a beautiful, messy journey as Lila searches for her identity among two very different cultures and within a family defined by each other in the best and worst of ways. A- —Meghan Siegler

By Any Other Name, by Jodi Picoult (Ballantine Books, 544 pages)

Jodi Picoult does not shy away from heavy-hitting topics. In the same way that she tackles things like abortion in A Spark of Light, teen suicide in The Pact, school shootings in 19 Minutes, and Covid in Wish You Were Here, Picoult dives into the silencing of women today and throughout history in her latest, By Any Other Name.

Many of Picoult’s recent books have frustrated me with their strong political views and cultural commentary, not because I disagree with her, necessarily, but because I don’t want any author’s viewpoints shoved down my throat — put the topic out there and let me think about it. Also, I want my fiction to be a little more fictitious and a little less like I’m reading an op-ed in today’s newspaper.

By Any Other Name explores the history of repressed women in a way that mostly allows the story to do the talking. The book has two storylines: One harkens back to the 16th and 17th centuries and follows the semi-fictional life of a real woman, Emilia Bassano. Based on significant research, Picoult depicts her as a closet writer who is forced to be a lord’s courtesan for many years, then an abused wife for many more — all while writing poems and plays that an actor named William Shakespeare publishes for her under his name.

The second storyline takes place in modern day and follows Melina Green, a playwright who struggles to get her works produced, presumably because she is a woman. This is somewhat proven when one of her plays — about her ancestor, Emilia — finally gets published after its authorship is mistakenly attributed to her best friend, Andre. The irony here is that Andre is gay and Black and far from the cis white male stereotype that Picoult suggests dominates even the modern playwriting field.

Interestingly, given the subject, I felt that Melina and Emilia’s storylines could have been written by two different authors — Melina’s clearly by Picoult, where the moral of the story may as well be bolded, underlined and highlighted. (One of many examples is when Melina is talking to theater critic Jasper Tolle about why plays about “complicated, wholly realized women” don’t make it to the stage. When he says that she’s “painting with a very broad brush when it comes to what gets produced and what doesn’t,” she responds, “That is exactly the kind of thing a straight white man would say,” then waits for him to tell her she’s wrong — “which,” Picoult writes, “of course, would be proof of everything she was alleging.” Tell me, Ms. Picoult, how you really feel…).

Emilia’s story, on the other hand, seemingly could have been written by, well, any other name. Maybe this is a testament to Picoult’s ability to immerse herself in a different time period and develop a narrative based on thorough research, losing her own voice in Emilia’s in a way that she doesn’t with Melina, whose story is entirely fictional. With Emilia, it seems, all Picoult has to do is tell it like it is to get the point across (regarding Emilia’s forced relationship with Lord Chamberlain, she writes that Emilia “had been sold by her family, for her family” — no opinion there, just a fact that speaks volumes).

The difference in storytelling is somehow both fascinating and off-putting.

What I like about Emilia’s story: Emilia herself is a well-developed character whose strengths are best defined in her resilience and her intelligence; she uses both to get her writing in front of an audience, willing to forgo acknowledgment of her work in order to show her words to the world — and to make some much-needed money, as Shakespeare gave her a small portion of “his” earnings.

I also like Emilia’s secret friendship with Christopher “Kit” Marlowe, a well-known Elizabethan poet and playwright who was purportedly gay, a heavy drinker and a spy. Kit is rough around the edges but becomes a great friend to Emilia, adding an unexpected emotional arc and some comic relief. Meanwhile, Emilia’s secret relationship with Southampton is lovely and passionate and shows a spark of brightness that typically lies dormant inside her.

Emilia’s arranged relationship with Lord Chamberlain is not nearly as bad as it could be (as we see later, when she is beaten severely and often by the man she is forced to marry). She isn’t his mistress by choice, but Lord Chamberlain is a kind man, never controlling or cruel, and she benefits from both his wealth and the autonomy he grants her. She is, for those years, “a nightingale in the loveliest of cages.”

Melina’s story, by comparison, is more straightforward, specifically addressing her challenges as a female playwright. Her friendship with Andre is fun and quippy (at least at first), and her interactions with Jasper are intriguing. Her chapters are a breath of fresh, modern air, if you can get past the heavy-handed feminist commentary.

There’s a lot to like in By Any Other Name, but there’s also a lot going on — a lot of characters and a lot of scenes (if this were a play the stage crew would be marathon-level exhausted by the final act).

There were parts that dragged a bit and sometimes seemed redundant, especially in Emilia’s chapters. If I had been able to appreciate more of the Shakespearean references that Picoult weaves into those chapters — as notated at the end of the book — it probably would have enhanced my reading experience. But I’m a former English major who actually studied some Shakespeare (albeit more than two decades ago), so I have to question how much this will appeal to the masses.

By Any Other Name takes the often questioned legitimacy of Shakespeare’s authorship and makes a compelling case while weaving in a modern story that Picoult uses to show how far we’ve come as a society but also how far we have to go. It’s a long but worthwhile journey if you like strong female characters or you’re captivated by the idea that Romeo and Juliet may have been penned by a woman. B+ —Meghan Siegler

Our Kindred Creatures, by Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy (Knopf, 374 pages)

With the notable exception of factory farms, cruelty to animals is generally not tolerated in the U.S. today. Criminal penalties exist for everything from neglect to the hoarding of pets; New Hampshire’s definition of animal abuse even includes taking a colt from its mother in the first three months of life.

It’s hard to imagine, then, that just 175 years ago animal cruelty was rampant and for the most part rarely noticed or remarked upon. The change to where we are now didn’t occur gradually but was the result of a moral crusade that began in the 1860s with three New Englanders at the helm.

In Our Kindred Creatures, husband-and-wife team Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy weave together the stories of George Thorndike Angell of Massachusetts, Caroline Earle White of Philadelphia and Henry Bergh of New York, the latter of whom was said to have founded “a new type of goodness.” While many other people have argued for compassion to animals over the course of human history, these three were especially effective and their stories are remarkable.

But let the reader beware: The book is tough reading for the tender-hearted and anyone who loved the movie The Greatest Showman. Hugh Jackman’s portrayal of P.T. Barnum, it turns out, left quite a bit out.

Angell is perhaps the best-known of the three crusaders, as his name is attached to a Boston animal hospital and an animal shelter near the Massachusetts-New Hampshire state line. But it’s Bergh whose story is the most compelling. He was left a fortune by his father, which enabled him to travel as a young man. During those travels he had a moral epiphany when he watched a brutal bullfight in Spain and was horrified not just by the suffering of the animals but by the glee he witnessed in the audience by a family with young girls. Bergh came to believe that “cruelism” arises when people are entertained by animal suffering of any kind, and that human beings themselves are made morally worse by even witnessing it.

Inspired by animal-rights efforts in Europe, he came back to the U.S. and founded the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in 1866. Shortly afterward, thanks to Bergh’s efforts, New York passed its first anti-animal-cruelty law and ASPCA officers were given power to issue citations and make arrests. Bergh himself took to the streets, at first going after people abusing horses, and cattle en route to slaughter. He also boarded a ship carrying sea turtles from Florida to New York and tried to bring its captain to justice. (The effort failed when the judge ruled that turtles were fish and were not subject to animal cruelty laws.)

But Bergh most famously sparred with P.T. Barnum, whose story in The Greatest Showman was shockingly whitewashed. As Barnum bought and displayed an enslaved person in his exhibits, he also had elephants and whales captured and brought to New York for display. The whales all died in short order, but none in such a grisly fashion as the two that were burned in the fire that consumed Barnum’s “museum” in 1865.

Bergh and his compatriots were operating in a time in which animals were as numerous as humans on city streets, and they were not romanticized as they are today. Their excrement and, often, carcasses, were everywhere, and stray dogs were rounded up and drowned en masse in New York and beaten to death in Philadelphia. Dogfighting and rat baiting (betting on how fast dogs could kill a collection of rats) were common and cheap forms of entertainment.

Animals were also suffering behind closed doors in more sterile environs — laboratories and classrooms where vivisection was common — and at one point Bergh sent his ASPCA agents undercover into hospitals to see first-hand what was being done, similar to the undercover operations still done by PETA today.

Word spread throughout New England about what Bergh was doing, and the ASPCA offices were visited by people hoping to launch similar efforts in their own communities. One such person was Caroline Earle White, who visited Bergh on her way home to Philadelphia after spending the summer in the Adirondacks. White, like many people drawn to the animal-abuse cause, was an abolitionist, and she went on to found the Women’s SPCA of Pennsylvania and the American Anti-Vivisection Society.

She was also instrumental in the change to a more merciful manner of killing shelter dogs — using carbon dioxide, which of course is seen as cruel today, but at the time was seen as a step up from bludgeoning a dog to death with an ax. Also, in a revolutionary shelter that White and her colleagues created, dogs were given shelter and water, “and all were fed a healthy diet of horsemeat, cornmeal, and crisped pork skin, even those destined for culling.”

A Quaker-turned-Catholic, White had been troubled seeing mules and horses struggling to pull streetcars heavy with coal. She had started changing her routes around town so that she didn’t have to endure the sight. But one of the more horrific examples of horses being literally worked to death happened in Boston in 1868, when a “sleighing horse race” took place that resulted in the deaths of both animals after they were compelled to pull 400-pound sledges from Boston to Worcester, a distance of 38 miles.

The winner died the night of the race; the other horse a few weeks later. Reading about the event compelled Angell to renew efforts on behalf of animals, pushing for a law that would prevent such abuses and starting a newspaper that would go to every town in Massachusetts with the name “Our Dumb Animals” (“Dumb” here meant mute, not stupid). The publication would endure until 1970.

Wasik and Murphy are excellent storytellers, which is no surprise — he is the longtime editorial director of The New York Times Magazine, she is a veterinarian, and their first book, 2012’s Rabid, a history of rabies, was well-received. What was surprising to me was how much of this story I knew nothing about, even as an animal lover living in New England — from the Barnum whales to a horse plague that swept the country in the 1870s to how a novel published more than a decade earlier in England, Black Beauty, came to be harnessed by Angell to galvanize compassion for horses.

The authors say they researched Our Kindred Creatures for three years; 30 would have been equally believable. They have crafted an extraordinary, though heartbreaking, story. A+ —Jennifer Graham

Not in Love,by Ali Hazelwood (Berkley, 400 pages)

Ali Hazelwood prefaces her latest book with what is, essentially, a fair-warning note to her readers: Not in Love, she says “is, tonally, a little different from the works I’ve published in the past. Rue and Eli have dealt with — and still deal with — the fallout from issues such as grief, food insecurity, and child neglect. They are eager to make a connection but are not sure how to go about it except through a physical relationship. The result is, I think, less of a rom-com and more of an erotic romance.”

Hazelwood has thus far been known by fans mainly as a rom-com writer who creates smart female lead characters and puts them in STEM-related work environments amongst other smart people and, inevitably, a male counterpoint. In Not in Love, Rue is a biotech engineer working in food science, so we’ve got the STEM setting, and we have the male counterpoint – in this case, his name is Eli, and he works for a company that’s trying to take over Kline, the company Rue works for.

The difference between Not in Love and Hazelwood’s other STEM romances is a much stronger emphasis on sexual chemistry and very explicitly written descriptions of what happens when that chemistry ignites. When Hazelwood warns readers that this is more “erotic romance” than rom-com, she’s not kidding.

But, in addition to the (plentiful) steamy scenes, everything I’ve liked about Hazelwood’s rom-coms is here too: witty banter, emotional complexity and well-drawn characters.

I love that Rue is science-smart but not unapproachable; there are plenty of relatable I-need-to-Google-this types of moments. Case in point, the book opens with Rue and her friend Tisha trying to figure out what a loan assignment is; they ask her friend’s sister, a lawyer, who doesn’t understand their lack of comprehension (“You guys are doctors,” she says, to which Tisha points out that “the topic of private equity firms and loan assignments did not come up in any class during our chemical engineering PhDs. A shocking oversight, I know….”).

Meanwhile, Rue could not be convinced to dumb down the title of her Ph.D. presentation: “A Gas Chromatography and Mass Spectrometry Investigation of the Effect of Three Polysaccharide-Based Coatings on the Minimization of Postharvest Loss of Horticultural Crops.” Her unapologetic thought is, “I had no talent for enticing people to care about my work: either they saw its value, or they were wrong.”

Rue is unapologetic about her dating life, too. She has a “no repeats” rule, meaning one and done, no exceptions; she doesn’t want a relationship, or the emotions that go with it. That was her plan when she matched with Eli on a dating app. She didn’t expect to ever see him again, so of course he ends up at the center of her workplace drama.

Rue probably could have stuck to her no repeats rule — she’s that emotionally stunted — but Eli falls hard for her. I like that the book moves between Rue’s point of view and Eli’s, because we can see how intense his feelings, emotional and otherwise, are, compared to her internal hesitations. And yet Eli is nothing but respectful to her and her hesitations, despite his desire for more, which makes him a very likable character.

The supporting characters aren’t always likable, but intentionally so — they all have a purpose and elevate the story, and many of their interactions with Rue and Eli are hilarious, adding to the novel’s smart, sassy vibe.

The plot is intriguing and believable, as Rue tries to save her scientific work from the grasp of Eli’s company, thinking — incorrectly, of course — that they’re being greedy. More seriously, as Hazelwood points out, there are mentions of grief, food insecurity and child neglect, but it’s not as depressing as it sounds. They’re issues that Rue and Eli dealt with that still impact them as adults, but there are no heavy-handed lessons or weepy sob stories — just real, life-goes-on reminders that what’s in the past doesn’t always stay in the past, and it can take a lot of work to build trust and open your heart after it’s been hurt.

This is another winner for Hazelwood, and I would highly recommend it to anyone who likes their romantic fiction smart, emotional and extra spicy. Just not you, Mom, and if you do read this, please never tell me. A-