4.5 stars
CBR16 Sweet Books: Cozy
48-year-old Maggie’s son has recently moved away to college and now she’s stuck in the big house she got in the divorce some years earlier, in a town where she barely knows anyone. She’s unapologetically grumpy and doesn’t actually want to expand her social circle. She worries about her son in college, however, and keeps trying to challenge him to socialise and make friends. He turns the table on her and demands that she do the same. She has absolutely nothing in common with the women her own age, but reluctantly goes to a couple of parties to be able to send her son pictures as “proof.”
50-year-old Aiden moved back to his home town to take care of his ailing father, and now that his father has passed, he is trying to care for his demanding mother, without much help from his brother (who also happened to marry Aiden’s ex-fiancee after dumping Aiden rather spectacularly once she discovered some things about him that she didn’t like). Aiden blows off steam by running a guild in an online roleplaying game, and when Maggie joins, they strike up a friendship. Due to a series of misunderstandings, Aiden thinks Maggie is a senior citizen (it doesn’t help that she keeps saying she’s old enough to be his mother). Maggie does think she’s old enough to be Aiden’s mother, since she believes him to be a twenty-something community college student.
Because of this misunderstanding about their respective ages, even when their online chats take a more flirty direction, neither are seriously considering actually doing anything about it. When they eventually do meet, and realise that they’re age-appropriate for one another, there is still complicated emotional baggage in both of their pasts that make taking a new chance at love and a relationship a very tricky thing.
This book came highly recommended by two people whose opinions about books I always trust, narfna and Emmalita, because they rarely, if ever, steer me wrong. Both were very complimentary about this book, and they were not wrong.
Full review here.