As the CEO of her late father’s company, Eleanor/Nora Cromwell works far too much. Her friends insist she needs rest, and Nora wants to take the company down an environmentally-friendly route. Two birds with one stone, she rents a cottage in a small town in rural Canada to do research on real estate development that can fund her ambitious projects. She doesn’t expect to fall in love – with the town, with the people who live there, with the gorgeous town mechanic…

This is essentially a Hallmark movie, complete with a well-known trope: big-city-protagonist moves to the country with Big Ideas that the town doesn’t actually want, and comes to realize that small-town life is what she’s always been missing. Complete with romance. Only two major differences: 1) it’s’ a lesbian romance, and 2) this get far spicier than any Hallmark movie ever dreamed of. Heh.

Since I began reading fanfic in 2023, I’ve forgotten a lot of the reading guidelines that I stuck to during my years of blogging. A few times this year, I’ve mentioned finishing books out of one obligation or another, and this one is no exception. (What obligation? I’d bought it and couldn’t return it. Silly, I know.) It wasn’t a bad book, but the two primary premises are things I dislike.

First, there’s the whole glorification of small-town life. I’ve lived in every size of city between population 700 and population 5 million, and small towns are not my thing. There are a lot of insidious tendrils that lurk in small towns, and when country life is glorified, it often doesn’t acknowledge those bits. (This is, btw, the same in any story that stratifies big city life over small towns, though historically, fiction has skewed more toward rural nostalgia than vice versa. Think: the pastoral movement.) Second, the entire relationship between Nora and Dani is grounded in blatant dishonesty, and yet is called romantic. Maybe it’s the neurospicy in me, but I can’t get behind dishonesty forming the cornerstone of a relationship, especially when said dishonesty, once revealed, is far easier to forgive than it ever would be in real life. Lies (including deliberate obfuscation) are simply not okay on this scale and in this context, imo.

Setting that aside, the book has some good points in its favor, too. I liked what Forrester did with Nora’s name as the book progressed, and how it changed (multiple times) throughout. While the small town’s tolerance for the queer community was idealistic, I still love seeing that and hope that many communities, big or small, can have this in the future. Other than the dishonesty thing, I enjoyed the relationship between Nora and Dani, especially since neither woman fell into blatant gender roles, as happens too often when people write gay fiction. (Looking at you, book!Heated Rivalry…) The spicy sections were gorgeously written, and didn’t feel cringy like some of the lesbian scenes I’ve read in the last year have. I think I would actually enjoy reading more from Forrester – just not a book based on premises that touch on personal pet peeves.

Performance: This audiobook was read by Krystal Hammond, and she did a good job at it. I enjoyed the various voices she used for a huge cast of characters, and she read the spicy bits without any awkwardness that would normally pull me out of scenes.