Grief can be a hard thing to balance in a romance novel. I am particularly wary of books around the grief associated with the death of dads, which is why I had initially held off on starting Janine Amesta’s Love at First Flight even though emmalita sang its praises. But I started following Amesta on Instagram and when she put out a call for ARC readers I signed up… and received a copy of her upcoming release, The Wedding Con, which is a sequel to Love at First Flight. I prefer to read series in order when I can, so it was time to pull Love at First Flight up to the top of my eReader (I bought it months ago).
I devoured this book. I snuck in reading it when I should have been doing other things. I am so taken by how Amesta quickly and deftly built the emotional lives of Selah and Dex so that their meet cute (he is proposing to his girlfriend in Selah’s hot air balloon and is turned down. Selah then accidentally tips the basket of the balloon over on landing, causing her to fall on Dex making things even more awkward) becomes an emotional beat that is returned to several times over the course of the book, and each time reveals something new about the characters.
But the brilliant thing in Amesta’s story structure is that while the failed proposal is the thing in the narrative, it isn’t the only meet cute. There’s a delightful phone conversation when Dex books the balloon trip, there’s a run in at the state park he’s a ranger at a few weeks later, there’s him (tipsily) stepping in to help her escape an awful first date… all these interactions stack up with ones I’m not mentioning in a way that naturally brings these two together, but also lets them each hold onto their own misconceptions which have to be reconciled.
Because the grief is big here – both in Selah’s loss of her dad unexpectedly and the fallout for her future plans and their family business, and also in Dex’s reckoning with the life he had growing up and the different life he wants for himself as an adult. Dex is grieving what he didn’t have, and also his own misplaced expectations on his previous relationship. Selah is running, without realizing she is, and its causing rifts with her sisters. So when Selah agrees to have her family’s balloon company help Dex raise money for an animal rehab facility at his park to help birds like the crow Harper he rescued the previous year (and who has adopted him – she plays a great supporting role in the courtship without being unrealistic) everyone is involved and what the relationship is between Dex and Selah is forefronted.
I’m so happy to have read this, and now even more excited to get to The Wedding Con, as Amesta layered in the background for that pairing excellently in Love at First Flight.
Bingo Square: Family. Family, its interactions and expectations, plays a big part in story.
(Fun side note, for the first time in YEARS I’m one square away from Bingo within my first ten bingo reviews… but the book I have picked out for that square is WEEKS away from being read, so my streak of many reviews before a Bingo is likely to continue.)