Review: Love Notes A Harmony Lake Small Town Romance by Lisa Henry
Two hearts, one cabin: Can a quiet woodworker and a struggling author carve out a love story together?
Ryan Devlin loves his life in Caldwell Crossing. His career as a woodworker is fulfilling, and his close-knit group of friends are like brothers to him. Ryan is quiet and introverted and not interested in making changes to his life and his routines—not when he still struggles with memories of childhood bullying and feelings of inadequacy. But when his sister needs to relocate a short-stay guest because of a plumbing emergency at her rental house and asks to use Ryan’s cabin, how can he say no?
Adam Nelson comes to Caldwell Crossing to finish writing the latest book in his cozy murder mystery series—after the last one was trashed in a viral review. He needs peace and quiet and to be left undisturbed. So why can’t he stay away from the handsome woodworker whose workshop is next door to the gorgeous lakeside cabin he’s staying in?
As Ryan and Adam connect and their friendship shifts into something more, can they decide whether to trust their growing feelings and put their faith into the fate that brought them together?
Love Notes contains an introverted, dyslexic woodworker, a writer pretending to his agent that everything is under control, found family, best friends, and a cat with no name.
Readers please note that this book is part of the four book series set in fictional town of Harmony Lake and each one is (I believe, I have not read other three books just looked at the covers and read the blurbs) devoted to one guy in the group of four childhood friends finding love. I cannot be sure, but I think that the timelines of each book run very close to each other.
Review:
Dear Lisa Henry,
I enjoy your contemporary stories and as I may have mentioned before contemporary m/m romances are my least favorite m/m subgenre. It is just I often feel that in a contemporary the potential couple is not “busy enough”. I exclude busy enough in bed in this statement. I am often bored when I read contemporary. Luckily this was not true here. Ryan was an interesting and likable character. I enjoyed the passion he put in his work. I sympathized a lot with his dyslexia related struggles. I also really liked his friends and may even check out their books. They seemed genuinely sweet and treated each other as friends should be treating each other in my mind.
I liked Adam too, even though I was tempted to roll my eyes at the “being traumatized by the review” storyline. To the author’s credit it ended up being a bit more complex than I was worried about initially, but the temptation to roll my eyes remained in a sense that I have no idea why the reviewer would be “feeling bad” at all in the first place. If you trashed the author as a person, if you mentioned anything about them as a person, you as a reviewer deserve all the scorn you will get, but it was made very clear that this reviewer stuck to the substance of the book and even Adam acknowledged that he was right. I do not even mind Adam’s behavior when they met in person, he was nice enough, but man, just stay away from the reviews, problem solved no?
Honestly though, my main issue with this book is very Insta Love. It was so, so fast. And again, I don’t mind fast *attraction*, but it felt as if they felt in love (and moved in together!) after their second if not the first date and they were already day dreaming about something more.
They were lovely together, though, once they were together. The conflict was very believable to me even if resolved with one conversation which makes sense considering how the conflict could have been and was resolved.
Grade: B-
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I so share your thoughts about m/m contemporaries in general. So often there’s not a great deal of plot, and the characters develop and acknowledge their feelings so quickly that the rest of the book is just practical details of merging their lives. I DNF a lot of such books somewhere between the 50% and 80% mark, not because they’re badly written or because I don’t like the characters, but because I feel that their romance arc is done and I’m ready to read about someone else now.
But I have read and enjoyed several Lisa Henry books. Thankfully they are not usually afflicted by that other contemporary curse: extreme long-windedness.
@oceanjasper: Absolutely I liked several of her other contemporaries a lot as well – one of the few exceptions.