This is actually what I read to end the year because mentally, I couldn’t manage much else. I needed the book equivalent of like, season 7 Law & Order, where I don’t have to pay attention to much except when Lenny Briscoe has a good one liner. And it was available on Kindle through the library, so I could read in bed while awake from 2:30 to 4:30 every morning.
Christmas season is tough, y’all. So’s menopause, for those of you wondering.
Anyway, Nora loves a good saga, and this one is about three adopted brothers who come home to Chesapeake Bay, a small town on the water in Maryland (? I think? I can’t remember, but there’s a lot of crabs so probably Maryland). As their father dies, he extracts a deathbed promise from them: take care of the new stray boy he’s brought home.
Easier said than done, though, as none of these men are the Mary Poppins type, and the kid – Seth – is a troubled young boy who is poised to run at the slightest hint that he might get sent back to his mother. (Who is pretty horrible, even by book standards.) But the brothers pool their resources, taking turns and bringing Seth in to the family.
Sea Swept is the first of the series, and focuses on the eldest son, Cameron Quinn, a racecar driver and ladies man who is always off chasing the next hottest thing. So it cramps his style to come home and have to play Mr. Mom, but Anna Spinelli, Seth’s social worker, and her long legs and Italian cooking, makes it a bit easier. There is angst – and probably it’s, you know, against all sorts of rules to sleep with the guardian of the kid you are sworn to protect, but this is Noraland and we don’t need to worry about that.
Rising Tides tells the story of Ethan, the middle child, the one who stayed behind and became a fisherman. He’s been in love with a local girl, Grace, since they were young, but Grace is a fiercely independent single mother of a sweet young baby girl, and Ethan is too tongue tied to do anything about it. Luckily, Anna manages to play Cupid and Ethan and Grace finally get out of their own way.
Inner Harbor is about Phillip Quinn, the former teenage runaway turned sophisticated advertising executive who cares more about the perfect bottle of wine than the perfect woman. But when a mysterious woman named Sybill arrives in town, he can’t get her out of his thoughts. It turns out, though, that Sybill is actually Seth’s long lost aunt, and Phillip – and the rest of the Quinns – struggle a bit with the fact that she was not exactly honest when she first arrived. She redeems herself in the end by vouching for the Quinns, and she and Phillip live happily ever after. Again, a little bit icky if you think about it, but it’s Nora, so just let it go.
The last book takes place about 15 years later. Chesapeake Blue is Seth’s story. He’s all grown up now, a famous artist who has come home to his family after several years. They’re all thrilled to see him, but he’s more thrilled to meet the new florist in town. There are some sexytimes scenes where he paints her, which sounds good in a romance novel but all I could think about was how stiff I’d be laying in the same position on the ground outside. That’s why romance novel heroines are young (er than me. They can get up from the floor without assistance.) Seth’s birth mother is in town too – she wants money again – but the Quinns aren’t going to let that happen.
And of course, it wouldn’t be Nora without some paranormal stuff. Papa Quinn shows up to each of the brothers from the Great Beyond. Sometimes I think it’s hokey when she does this, but it was the holidays, and I was missing my folks, and I thought, it’d be nice if my mom or dad came to talk some sense in to me. Or just say hi. So this time, I didn’t mind. Bring on the hokey.