This was a sweet, predictable love story with some characterization issues that I found irritating, and plot devices that felt forced.
Kara Larson’s mother died when she was young, and it destroyed her family. Her father essentially withdrew from the world and stopped being a father to his three kids, and Kara’s older sister became a shrew. Kara “ran away” to the neighbors’ house, where her friend Jack’s mother had her own troubles with Jack’s abusive father. Kara and Jack fall in love as early teens, but Jack and his mom have to flee in the middle of the night to escape abuse. Jack promises to find her, but then never does.
Fast forward about 15 years. Kara’s family is still broken. She’s engaged to a guy who checks all the boxes, who’s also basically a nice narcissist. She’s volunteering at an old folks’ home for reasons I wasn’t quite clear on, and visits an elderly Irish woman named Maeve, who keeps harping on her lost love, and challenging Kara about her own first love (taking for granted that she has one, and that her fiance isn’t him). This makes Kara search for Jack, and she discovers that he’s now in a fairly famous band. (That trope, long lost love is now a rock star, book unfolding in a small beach town, is almost exactly like an Anabel Monaghan book I read recently too. Uncannily so.)
You can guess where it goes from here. Kara finds and reconnects with Jack, and they have some very compromising scenes together for a woman who is still engaged to someone else. Her sister is unbearable, but we’re supposed to forgive her because she was traumatized as a kid, as if that excuses it. I just felt like a lot of the characters were self-centered and one-dimensional–Kara’s fiance too, which I suppose makes it a little better that she’s basically cheating on him.
Anyway. Maeve’s story at least does drive Kara to research and do some soul-searching, though it feels like a device, and not like Maeve herself matters as a character in her own right. Jack was Prince Charming-perfect, like all romantic leads typically are. It was entertaining enough that I finished it, and it was clean. A good wind down at the end of the evening bedtime read.
My rating: ***
Language: none that I can recall
Violence: none
Sexual content: none
Political content: none
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