This is a sneaky, emotional book about what community is and what it means to people.
I don’t remember exactly what made me put this on my to read list back in April, but one of the reviewers I follow reviewed it as an ARC in March and described its vibe as “echoes of Nora Roberts with a flair of Anita Kelly + Kate Clayborn that really made me smile and tugged at my heart”. Okay, La Nora has had diminishing returns over the years, but she’s one of my old school romance reliables, and I have loved the books I’ve read by Anita Kelly and Kate Clayborn. The plot summary also caught my eye, from Goodreads: “Single mom Tansy Perkins only has room in her life for her daughter and her library. And maybe the next book to add to her collection. But after a catastrophic hurricane severely damages her library, she’s forced to temporarily move her branch into the adjacent county botanic gardens, where Jack Reid—the world’s grouchiest gardener who rescued her and her daughter from the flood—happens to be the assistant director.”
That said, I entered this one with a bit of trepidation – would the content hit a little too close to home, with a major plot point of county officials cutting funding/refusing to do needed renovation work while telling the public that they were doing those things for public gardens and libraries just make me think of my actual job and all its struggles? In a way, yes, but it proved to me that Sweeney had done the background work of talking to people who work in these kinds of public service jobs for municipalities and what it can feel like to be trapped between the powers that be and the public.
There’s also a beautiful nuance to the personal baggage that the characters bring to the table. Jack’s divorce – and the reasons for it – have made him shut down portions of himself, but at his core he cares deeply about his people (and people in general, but he isn’t going to admit to that) and is the sort of person who will go out and rescue stranded people in a flood because he has a boat and a best friend who is a firefighter and then be entirely perplexed that people want to recognize him for this work and needs to be tricked into going to a ceremony for responders. Tansy is a hyper-self-reliant single mom who had her sense of safety yanked out from underneath her by the hurricane just as she was getting her footing. Without going too much into it – yep, the various beats of that characterization rang true even if it was difficult to read at times. I fully understand readers who just can’t with Tansy, but I could.
Sweeney takes time to build the antagonistic relationship between Tansy and Jack and then unravel how its more about circumstance than anything else. It’s never explicitly stated, but Tansy’s daughter Briar is likely on the spectrum, and the text is clear that she is dealing with PTSD from the hurricane. It’s in that emotional place where Jack and Briar form a bond (he being the one who rescued them from floodwaters, likely also on the spectrum, definitely has his own PTSD) and Sweeney puts the fulcrum point in the plotting here – Tansy sees him another way and the walls start to come down. I don’t want to get too bogged down in the plot, but if this kind of storytelling works for you, then this book should be on your to read list. I can’t quite make myself round up to five stars, but this is on par with Out on a Limb and just behind In a Jam for favorite romances of the year for me.
Bingo Square: Work. The shared work setting is the engine of this story, and home to so many delightful secondary characters.