12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
an entertaining contemporary romance, August 11, 2007
Former mayor of Avalon, New York, single mom Nina Romano realizes her dream is close to being fulfilled. She needs to obtain a bank loan to restore and convert the historical Inn at Willow Lake into an upscale retreat.
However, to her chagrin, she learns her long time rival Greg Bellamy has decided to do just that to his family owned historical Inn; he begins the restoration. Divorced, Greg, the father of two including a pregnant teen, wants to hire Nina to manage the facility, but she refuses. As they continue an argument that they started twenty years ago when they were teens, the two continue to ignore the attraction they always felt, but feared pursuing. However, this time around they have teenage children and the inn to contend with besides their not so secret anymore feelings of love.
Returning to the Lakeshore Chronicles (see SUMMER AT WILLOW LAKE and THE WINTER LODGE), Susan Wiggs writes an entertaining contemporary romance. The lead combatants battle their inner attraction that they hide from the other out of fear of ridicule and they assume from their offspring. The story line focuses on their second chance at a permanent relationship if either would take that gigantic fearful first step.
Harriet Klausner
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11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Boring young adult/women's fiction - not romance!, April 24, 2010
I knew in advance I was going to have some issues with this book, as it prominently features the insipid Daisy, and because I was ambivalent towards the supposed heroine, Nina. Be warned: this is not a romance book; it's a women's fiction story with a very heavy focus on teenagers. There is no romance, but there's plenty of discussion about pregnancy, relationships between children and parents, and speculation about lifestyle choices and ways to raise children. I'm no fan of women's fiction, so I certainly wasn't a fan of this third book in the series.
I couldn't figure out what the point of this story was. So much of it is told in flashbacks - something Susan Wiggs has done to great effect in other books - but here there was no story in the present. We learn about Nina and Sophie's teen pregnancies in the flashbacks, but there's no point to them as we already know the consequences of these actions. In the present day chapters nothing at all happens. The characters bumble around renovating the inn, and that's about it. The author was so busy writing character studies she forgot to put the plot in! In the previous books in the series the background information fed us tidbits to help solve the mysteries of the present. Here there was no mystery, no point to their inclusion apart from drawing out a book that was already too long. The only reason I paid attention to them was because the other parts of the story were so boring.
I wasn't expecting was for this not to be a romance at all, and for it to turn out to be a story about pregnancy. It was a fair assumption to make that this story would have at least one relationship at the forefront, as it was marketed as such, but I was wrong. Teenage pregnancy is done to death and then some - there are three teenage pregnancies covered in detail in this story. The romance is just not there. The hero and heroine barely have a scene together until the end of the book - there are about twenty pages actually devoted to their romance (in a book of more than four hundred pages!), and the first of those is page 329! And even then any relationship they might have is completely overshadowed by the hero's pregnant daughter, Daisy.
I'm not sure I was happy with the way the three teens handled their pregnancies. Not one of them was honest with the father of their child, and for me that is an unforgivable thing to do to a man.
Every conversation Nina and Greg had was about their children. They seemed to only have got together because Nina missed her daughter and Greg needed help with his kids. There were definitely no fireworks, not even a little spark. It was just a convenient situation for two people looking to settle down with someone okay.
There is not a single thing keeping Nina and Greg apart in the present. Not a thing. But they go the entire book apart even though they both want each other, and Nina is still dating other men in the last third of the story. Huh? I know it's Wiggs' tradition to keep her couples apart until the very end of the book, but how about a bit of variety?!
I'm a bit confused why every character in the series meets the love of their life when they're still a child. They have some drama that keeps them apart until the present day, and their story is told through flashbacks and current incidents that show us why they were destined to be together. Once was enough, but then it happened again in the second book, and now again here in book three.
In the end I barely cared about Nina and Greg as both characters were abrupt, rude irrational, and completely unlikeable. On top of that they bored me. Wiggs' constant references to Nina's `Italian-American temperament' and the frequent stereotypes she attributed to her and her family were vaguely insulting. People of a certain ethnic origin aren't born with a particular temperament! I'm a child of European immigrants (Ukrainian) and I certainly wasn't born with a temperament that causes me to live off borscht, vodka and Cossack dancing! It was surprising, as in other areas Wiggs takes political correctness to a whole new level with her emphasis on `biracial' children and her preaching about illegal immigrants in book five.
This is the third of four books in a row in this series that cover the grand, melodramatic suffering of Greg's children Daisy and Max after his divorce. Four whole books about a drug-taking, pregnant schoolgirl and an angry, violent boy. The implication divorce is so horrible the kids are justified in their actions is downright wrong.
So many series are overtaken by teenage characters; the author thinks we'll love watching the evolution - the adolescence - of these bratty and stereotypically overly-troubled characters. Susan Wiggs has Daisy. Robyn Carr has a whole team of them. Even JR Ward ruined her vampire series with John Matthew. But here's the thing. If I wanted to read about screwed-up teenagers, I would have picked up a young adult book.
Daisy features prominently in thirteen of the book's twenty-nine chapters. And she is the main focus of the epilogue - we didn't even get to have a decent resolution to Nina and Greg's relationship because Daisy was the main focus of the last few chapters of the book. That's just too much page time for a secondary character. She's going to get her own book soon, but I don't see why we need it seeing as she's completely dominated the series thus far.
The constant usage of the full name of the inn - `the Inn at Willow Lake' - got annoying fast. I don't know why everything has to be spelled out all the time. Wiggs repeats dull and well-known information over and over. We only need to be told things once, maybe twice, and then we're set. Readers aren't going to forget all the details from one chapter to the next.
The book preceding this one was such a good read. There was mystery, romance, heartbreak, and a story that kept you turning the pages. This one was a waste of my precious reading time. The plot wasn't really there. The only interesting things that happened were in the flashbacks, and as we already knew the outcomes of those situations it wasn't interesting enough to make up for the lack of plot in the present day.
I honestly believe a person could skip this one and move on to book four in the series. These characters are forgettable, and as so little actually happens in this story you're not going to be missing much.
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