Category: Books

This Ordinary Stardust, by Alan Townsend (Grand Central Publishing, 261 pages)

The most nourishing soil in the world, Alan Townsend writes, starts with disaster:

“Pyroclastic explosions of ash and lava slam into hillsides and streams, obliterating trees and boiling fish alive in their water. Or massive glaciers suddenly pulverize everything in their path … then unleash a catastrophic flood for good measure. The aftermath is a horror — a moonscape of ruin. It is also a beginning.”

That’s all well and good when talking about geological processes, but what of more personal kinds of disasters, the kind that explode your life, as when both your wife and your 4-year-old daughter get diagnosed with brain cancer within the same year?

Townsend, a tattooed scientist and dean of the college of forestry and conservation at the University of Montana, is much too intelligent to offer platitudes in such a situation. This Ordinary Stardust is no ordinary memoir of a health crisis, as Townsend and his wife, Diana, are no ordinary people.

They are both brilliant scientists who have traveled extensively doing interesting work — when we meet Townsend he’s doing research in the Amazon on how to prevent deforestation, Diana is planning an excursion to collect bacterial samples in Antarctica when she gets sick.

But with the twin diagnoses, the couple is thrust into the strangest world yet, going from the world of the healthy to the world of the sick with frightening speed.

Little Neva’s diagnosis came first, and Townsend writes movingly of how hard it is to watch your child endure MRIs and IVs and CT scans at Colorado Children’s Hospital. At one point, her parents take Neva to a hospital cafe for ice cream, and the child asks if she can have more. “Hell yes, I thought,” Townsend writes. The child, like her parents, is stoic and tough, and a scene where Diana takes a team of residents and medical students to task for their callous treatment of Neva is a Tiger Mother master class in assertiveness.

Diana brings the same defiance to her own treatment. We already know the kind of woman she is from a story Townsend tells about how she badly injured her ankle while the two of them were running on a trail together in Costa Rica, where they were working. The next evening, though her ankle was still badly swollen, Townsend found her wrapping the ankle with strips of an old T-shirt and duct tape. “What are you doing?” he asked. “Going running,” she replied. He writes, “She had a look that challenged me to say more.”

This is also a woman, as Townsend says, who “couldn’t stop talking about bacteria,” who loved science so much that it was all she wanted to talk about on their runs.

When Diana starts having strange symptoms and is ultimately diagnosed with two tumors in her brain, she grumbles that they’d better not stop her going on her expedition to Antarctica the next year. She continues to run throughout her treatment, and even wins her age division in a road race. But glioblastoma is almost always deadly; just 5 percent of patients survive five years. It is not a spoiler to say that Diana is not among the 5 percent since the book jacket blurb reveals that she dies. By this point, we love her as much as her husband does, and the story of her passing is gut-wrenching, but also oddly beautiful.

Townsend writes the book at his wife’s request — she wanted others to learn from their story — and although he confesses up front that he is not a Christian or a church-goer, the story is wrapped in spiritual themes. Science, he writes, can nurture the soul; it offers hope “that life on earth can make its way through the eye of any needle, that our individual choices matter, and that love can bring us back from the brink of annihilation.”

He does not address any issues related to the possibility of an afterlife except in terms related to the title. It’s said that our physical bodies are composed of primordial atoms, elements formed in stars and possibly dating to the Big Bang. Townsend has been fascinated with this idea since he heard a professor talk about how we exchange this “stardust” with each other continually.

“When viewed in our most elemental form, people are trillions of outer-space atoms, moving around temporarily as one, sensing and seeing and falling in love. Then those atoms scatter, joining one new team for a bit, then another. Far from depressing,” he writes. In other words, we might only exist in this form for a short time, but “No matter what happens, we’re still here. And we will always be.”

That’s a far cry from the eternal life promised by some religions, but is still, as he writes, “profoundly comforting.” Grief can co-exist with wonder, Townsend finds on his family’s journey, and his memoir is both poignant and thought-provoking. B+

The Lost Letters from Martha’s Vineyard, by Michael Callahan (Mariner Books, 293 pages)

The quintessential beach read doesn’t have to have a beach in the title or cover art, but it helps. Just ask Elin Hilderbrand, the queen of beach reads, who recently announced she’s retiring from the genre because she has “run out of really good ideas.” Maybe Michael Callahan can step into the void.

Callahan, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, seems an unlikely author to produce a beach read, but that’s what The Lost Letters from Martha’s Vineyard is, despite its aspiring to be a Gone Girl-like thriller. It checks all the boxes: Island in the title. A beach on the cover. Plucky heroine, “roguish” love interest. Chowdah. Plus dueling timelines that go back and forth between the 1950s and 2018, just to make sure we’re paying attention.

The premise is intriguing enough: Kit O’Neill is a single woman who works for a TV star in Manhattan. After her parents died, she and her older sister were raised by the grandmother they called Nan in a roomy suburban colonial in Westchester County. The young women adored their grandmother and were devastated when she died, but it has fallen to them to clean out her house and ready it for sale, which they are reluctantly doing.

Cleaning out the attic, Kit works through the usual stuff of attics — dusty boxes filled with Christmas ornaments, old curtains and bills, yellowed photographs, all familiar. And then she finds a box full of curious things: a playbill from a 1959 production at the Martha’s Vineyard Playhouse featuring an actress called Mercy Welles, a couple of matching shells, a prize ribbon, and a photo of her grandmother with her arm around a man that Kit doesn’t recognize.

Intrigued, Kit takes the box downstairs and does a Google search for Mercy Welles — and among the results, she finds an article called “The Strange and Curious Case of Mercy Welles,” which detailed the mysterious disappearance of a Hollywood actress at the start of a promising career. There was a photo of this Mercy Welles: It was Kit’s grandmother, Nan.

Before Kit can recover from the shock, the author swoops us back to May 1959 to meet Mercy, a winsome young woman from the Midwest whose real name was Edith. “She was twenty-six but feared she looked 30. The industry did that to you. With her green eyes, pale skin, and wavy, honey-blond hair, she knew she was objectively pretty. It did little to assuage the paranoia.”

For all her insecurities, Mercy had gone to Los Angeles seeking a career and quickly became a success, getting engaged to a film producer and nominated for an Oscar as a best supporting actress within three years. But things weren’t good with the fiance, and at the suggestion of a friend, she made plans for the two of them to take a short vacation in New England. Mercy knew nothing about Martha’s Vineyard but imagined a week there in spring to be something like a travel brochure: “a fireplace, steaming mugs of cider, soft cashmere sweaters, a walk hand in hand by the water.”

Then she found her fiance at a hotel with another woman. The romantic vacation was off, but Mercy went to Martha’s Vineyard anyway to figure out her next steps. And within days, she had rented a cottage on the island for the entire summer and was befriending the locals.

Back to the future, in 2018, Kit turns investigator, thanks in part to the celebrity journalist she works for, who is intrigued by the story and is fine with Kit taking off to Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Massachusetts to try to unravel the mystery of how her grandmother sneaked out of fame’s glare and took to raising kids in anonymity in Rye, New York.

With some lucky breaks, she tracks down an old roommate of her grandmother’s, with whom Mercy had corresponded while she was in Martha’s Vineyard. (Not only was there no internet, but there was also not even an analogue telephone in her cottage, leading Mercy to write to the friend, “we’ll have to communicate the old-fashioned way, via correspondence. How very Jane Austen it all will be!”)

Then we’re back to Mercy, who was not quite as anonymous as she thought she would be on Martha’s Vineyard, as many of the islanders had seen the film for which she’d earned an Oscar nomination. As her summer unfolds, we learn about those mementos that her granddaughter will eventually find, as she becomes friendly with a gruff oysterman and with a young Black musician and playwright, and eventually becomes entangled in a crime involving the most famous family on the island.

And on it goes, back and forth between young Mercy and young Kit, as the riddles of the story are somewhat blandly unspooled. The author spent time at a writers’ colony on the island, and knows it well — perhaps too well, as at times he seems driven to mention every village and restaurant. Perhaps he plans to do for the Vineyard what Hilderbrand has done for Nantucket.

As beach reads go, The Lost Letters from Martha’s Vineyard does not disappoint, but it does in the places where striving to be something more. B- —Jennifer Graham

There Was Nothing You Could Do, by Steven Hyden (Hatchett, 272 pages)

When Steven Hyden was 6 years old, he found a cassette tape in the glove box of his parents’ car and asked his dad to play it. When the sound came through, after precisely nine seconds of silence, it was “my personal ‘big bang’ moment,” Hyden writes. “All these years later, I am still chasing the rush of hearing that titanic BOOM! in my father’s car.”

The artist was Bruce Springsteen; the album Born in The U.S.A., issued 40 years ago this year.

There Was Nothing You Could Do is Hyden’s exegesis of Springsteen’s impact — in Hyden’s own life and in the country, focusing on Springsteen’s best-selling album, released in 1984. The title is a line from the song “My Hometown,” the last single released from “Born in the U.S.A.” The subtitle references “the end of the heartland.” But don’t be scared off by that. While there is some politically tinged commentary, as has always accompanied Springsteen’s work, it’s mostly a book about music.

First and foremost, Hyden is a fan, although his fandom had an inauspicious beginning, coming as it did in childhood. Kids loved Born in the U.S.A. “for the dumbest possible reason — because we heard the songs constantly. That’s all it takes to appeal to little kids,” he writes. “Kids my age weren’t brainwashed, exactly. We were Boss-washed.”

It wasn’t as if that’s all he listened to, however; Hyden’s examination of the Boss-washing of America detours into other culturally significant pop musicians: Michael Jackson, Prince and Madonna (all of whom comprise “the big four” of the 1980s); as well as Elvis Presley and Bob Dylan. Springsteen, he writes, was something of a combination of the latter two: “… he could move like Elvis and write like Dylan. The pelvis and the brain had been fused into one.”

A critic for the entertainment website Uproxx and the author of previous books on music (Twilight of the Gods and Your Favorite Band is Killing Me), Hyden brings encyclopedic knowledge to the topic, and as such, There Was Nothing You Could Do sometimes reads like an encyclopedia, as when he lists the various iterations of songs that were proposed for Born in the U.S.A. when the album was under development. Herein he runs into a problem: For the Springsteen fanatic — and they are legion — much of this material might induce a yawn.

There’s a lot of material that seems better fit for a blog, such as digressions into the author’s fantasies: what would have happened, say, if Springsteen had drifted from the lane of heartland rock to straight-up country music, or had put out another album in 1985 when Springsteen mania was at its peak. (He even proposes a playlist for this.) And Gen Z might raise a collective eyebrow to Hyden pronouncing Springsteen more of a “national monument than a pop star” at the age of 75. For all of their success, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band never had a No. 1 hit.

Still, despite some vaguely silly asides, Hyden does a good job of explaining the Springsteen phenomenon as he delves into stories that relate specifically to Born in the U.S.A., such as how the “Dancing in the Dark” music video was made, and how it was received.

The video, directed by filmmaker Brian De Palma, shows Springstreen awkwardly dancing at a concert with Friends actress Courteney Cox (relatively unknown at the time). It “undeniably made him more famous in the short run, and it unquestionably made him easier to make fun of in the long run,” Hyden writes. The video has become a popular GIF and “personifies everything that is corny about Bruce Springstreen and almost nothing that is cool about him.”

But it could have been worse, Hyden reveals. In another video that was made and ultimately abandoned, Springsteen “looks like a mime attending a Jazzercise class,” he writes.

Hyden is at his best when he strings together snapshots from Springsteen’s life, from his troubled relationship to his father to the existential struggles that inform so many of his lyrics, and connects them to the singer’s appeal. “If you want to see the emotionally repressed man in your life cry — a stoic father, an unflappable granddad, a weird uncle, an immature brother — send him to a Bruce Springsteen concert,” Hyden writes.

Toward the end, he examines the controversy that erupted from the Super Bowl Jeep commercial that angered both conservatives and liberals in 2021. It was indicative of America’s deep political divide that a commercial inviting Americans to “meet here in the middle” irritated so many people. “‘The Middle’ was designed to please exactly no one,” Hyden writes. “In that way, Bruce did manage to unite red and blue America, ironically, their condemnation of him.”

Hyden did not interview the Boss for this book, although he’s been within 50 feet of him, at a concert where he obtained special press seating. His reporting comes from previously published articles, Springsteen’s autobiography and other books. and so much of this information is already out in the world; this is just an artful rearrangement of music history. For the casual fan, the minutiae might be too much. But Hyden is a skilled wordsmith, and There Was Nothing You Could Do is a surprisingly breezy read, despite the ominous title. It’s a sort of love letter we all might write to our favorite pop star if we had the time and skill. B-

The Demon of Unrest, by Erik Larson (Crown, 497 pages)

It may be an egregious conflict of interest for a native South Carolinian to review any book about the onset of the Civil War, given the Palmetto state’s outsized role in that conflict. So take everything I say here with a grain of grits.

But Erik Larson has produced a masterful work in The Demon of Unrest, his narrative history of one of the most consequential five months this country has seen: the time period bookended by the election of Abraham Lincoln on Nov. 7, 1860, and the shots fired on Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861. We all know generally how the story began and ended. Larson fills in the details, by presenting the stories behind the stories, in rich detail. Incredibly, he manages to make the story suspenseful.

Not that this hasn’t been done before — the Titanic movie was suspenseful, and we knew how that ended, too. But Jack and Rose were fictional characters, their travails invented by James Cameron. For The Demon of Unrest, Larsen combed through realms of historical documents and journals and reconstructed the minutiae of the lives of leading figures in the Civil War, some of whom, like Abraham Lincoln and Mary Boykin Chestnut, are well-known; and others, who may not be quite as familiar.

He then artfully assembled the information and, instead of trying to write history, he just told stories — stories that explain the onset of the Civil War better than any AP history course ever could.

Thousands of books have been written about Lincoln; NPR once reported that Lincoln is only second to Jesus of Nazareth in the number of books written about him. So for serious Lincoln fans, The Demon of Unrest may not bring much new information to their table in this deeply sympathetic portrait of the 16th president. And I would be remiss to not point out that this book is not kind to the South, focusing as it does on letters and speeches that make clear that the conflict hung on slavery, not states’ rights. (Although there was a Confederate officer in South Carolina who was literally named States Rights Gist — mercifully, the man only went by “States” and the name seems to have died on the battlefield with him.)

Even Mary Boykin Chesnut, the Civil War diarist who was the wife of a wealthy planter, does not come off looking great, though her writing is generally acclaimed and was the basis of a book that won a Pulitzer Prize for history. We may not cheer when her Mulberry plantation is desecrated by Union soldiers, but neither do we weep.

That said, Chesnut is not presented as abjectly villainous, as are Edmund Ruffin and James Hammond, two pro-slavery and pro-secession Confederates whose beliefs did not age well and whose deeds were abhorrent even for their time.

Hammond, for example, sexually abused people he enslaved and also four under-aged nieces; he wrote unashamedly about his exploits in his journals. There was a great scandal when the relationship with the nieces came to light and Hammond retreated from public life for a while but later, incredibly, was returned to public office in South Carolina. Ruffin, a Virginian, was famously assigned to fire the first shot on Fort Sumter. He did so after dining the night before on cheese and crackers, and sleeping on “a pallet under two thick blankets,” still dressed in his clothes, because he was so excited for the war to start.

There are heroes in The Demon of Unrest, however, apart from Abraham Lincoln; most notable is Major Robert Anderson, the commander of Fort Sumter, the small island in Charleston Harbor where the first shots of the war were fired. Anderson is heroic, despite having once been a slaveholder, not only because he was on the right side of history, but also because he remained loyal to the Union despite his deeply conflicted feelings about the impending war.

He was, for example, sympathetic to various complaints of the South, and he was friends with General P.G.T. Beauregard, South Carolina’s military commander. The two men had to navigate the increasing military hostilities amid a friendship that began at West Point. They were unfailingly solicitous to each other in their correspondence, even as they were making preparations for their respective forces to do battle.

One of the starkest takeaways of the book is how vitriolic the South had become not only to the union but to everyone in the North. And they especially hated people who lived in New England. William Russell, a war correspondent for the London Times, was reporting in the colonies and wrote, “Whether it be in consequence of some secret influence which slavery has upon the minds of men or that the aggression of the North upon their institutions … certain it is there is a degree of something like ferocity in the Southern mind toward New England which exceeds belief.”

One might say a vestige of that remains in the South’s animosity toward certain New England sports teams.

Larson ends his story on April 18, 1861, but includes an epilogue that gives the post-war outcomes of all his major players. The Demon of Unrest adds to his compendium of lengthy narrative histories that include his treatment of Winston Churchill and the London Blitz, the Galveston hurricane of 1900, and the build-up to World War II under Hitler’s Germany.

His books are exhaustive, and as such, some consider them exhausting, but he performs a kindness for the reader by formatting the stories in short chapters, some only four or five pages. They are the sort of books best read over the course of a year, not over the course of a vacation, and require a high degree of interest in the subject matter. But nobody does it better when it comes to putting readers in the trenches of history, in this case with cannonballs whizzing over our heads. A —Jennifer Graham

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-