I’ve had the Winston brothers series recommended to me by several friends, so I decided to give it a try. I started with Grin and Beard It, the second book in the series (the titles are all beard themed, in case you hadn’t guessed that already), because the first book was checked out from my local library and I am a chaos muppet.
Grin and Beard It tells the story of Sienna Diaz, an actress and screenwriter who is shooting a film in rural Tennessee. She meets Jethro Winston, a local park ranger, when he discovers her lost on the side of a mountain road, and they soon fall in love. The main impediments to their romance are Sienna’s fame and Jethro’s checkered past.
Both Sienna and Jethro were engaging and likable characters, but this book felt fell flat for me. I’m not sure exactly what the problem was. I think mostly it was that, other than the central love story, it didn’t feel like there was a lot going on. Sienna has a few career ups and downs, but never seems all that concerned about them. Jethro has a large family, and there is discussion of his past as a car thief and affiliation with the Iron Wraiths, a motorcycle gang that his father led before going to prison, but the family members don’t seem to have a lot to do or really distinguish themselves from one another very much. (To be fair, this may have been my fault for not starting with the first book.) The sprawling number of characters made me wish that the author had followed Kate McKean’s advice to make those two guys the same guy — like Sienna’s security detail is three people, which is probably realistic but it was really there was the main security guy who was an actual character and then two other guys who were also there. I feel like their names were Tim and Eric but I might have just made that up.
Anyway, the Iron Wraiths are up to some bad stuff, which felt tonally off for an otherwise lighthearted romance. Also, the choice of a biker gang as the major set of bad influences in the book felt very 1970s to me. (Maybe the issue is just that I’ve known people who were in motorcycle clubs and they’re just…groups of people who like to ride motorcycles. Also Sons of Anarchy was very popular, I guess. Possibly I’m also just being overly sensitive about Southern stereotypes. On the flip side, no one was particularly racist, so there’s that. Now I’ve gotten way off track. Chaos muppet, I warned you. )
It also felt like although there were a few impediments to Sienna and Jethro’s romance, none of them felt like very serious barriers. I know that one of the goals of romance is that we know the couple will end up together at the end of the book, but it was hard to take any of the impediments to Sienna and Jethro’s relationship seriously when neither of them seemed to worry about them for more than a few pages.
I did read the whole thing. The cover art was cute. Maybe you’ll like it more than I did, who knows?