Review: After Hours on Milagro Street by Angelina M. Lopez
Guapo pobrecito her grandmother calls him. The “poor handsome man.”
Professor Jeremiah Post, the poor handsome man, is in fact standing in the way of Alejandra “Alex” Torres turning Loretta’s, her grandmother’s bar, into a viable business. The hot brainiac who sleeps in one of the upstairs tenant rooms already has all of her Mexican American family’s admiration; she won’t let him have the bar and building she needs to resurrect her career, too.
Alex blowing into town has rocked Jeremiah to his mild-mannered core, but the large, boisterous Torres clan is everything he never had. He doesn’t believe Alex has the best interest of her family, their community or the bar’s legacy in mind. To protect all three, he’ll stand up to the tough and tattooed bartender with whom he now shares a bedroom wall—and resist the insta-lust they both feel.
But when an old enemy threatens Loretta’s and the surrounding neighborhood, Alex and Jeremiah must combine forces. It will take her might and his mind to save the home they both desperately need.
Review.
Dear Angelina M. Lopez,
I got this book as a gift during Heather’s book exchange on Good reads. I was trying to pick books to put on my wish list and despite the fact that I do not read a lot of m/f romance this one sounded like a lot of fun, and the cover looked great.
I am a big fan of well executed “from enemies to lovers” trope, so for that reason alone trying the book would have been a no brainer to me, but the blurb also promised small town romance with Mexican American character. I really wanted this book and would have bought it if nobody selected it for me.
I read it in one seating, so the writing was fun and engaging. The story and the settings were great. The author talked about wanting to tell the story of a family like hers, which settled in Kansas in the early 1900s and I thought this was extremely well done, it felt real, the settings and the traditions. I loved all the secondary characters, which was mostly Alex’s family and her extended family so to speak. Her sisters, her mother, her grandmother and several others.
I also thought that treasure hunt of the sorts which Alex and Jeremiah engaged in together was a very fun storyline.
I loved Jeremiah a great deal. I also loved Alex’s passion for her work, her desire to bring the family bar “Loretta” to its better days, her creativity and her willingness to work extra hard.
Why did I not grade the book higher? The romance itself, or more specifically the way Alex treated Jeremiah. Do not get me wrong, she was well written and complex character, I thought, and most of her actions were given plenty of reasons in the narrative.
But you see, as much as I thought that the author avoided making Alex a caricature, I still thought that her talking her own issues out on Jeremiah, who deserved none of it, was pretty horrible.
Again, in the context of the story all of it made sense and the author did a good job showing that Alex and Jeremiah fit well together, where chemistry, life goals and sexual connection was concerned. I did not doubt that Jeremiah loved her and that she loved him, but I am not sure that I trusted her even at the end of the story not to start verbally abusing him if she would need the outlet for her anger again.
Also, and I realize that this is a personal note but this is related to how I feel about characters like Alex. Even for my limited reading of m/f romance, I do realize that Alex is a gender swapped version of jerks male characters who had family issues in their past and took it out on their love interests and then apologized and apologized and were forgiven whether the forgiveness was warranted or not. When I say gender swapped version, I don’t mean to imply that Alex can be substituted in this specific narrative for a man and it will be the same story. I only mean that she is a well drawn woman who exhibited the same one trait that I am familiar with from may past reading as it is related to this story.
The abundance of such male characters was one of the main reason why I run from m/f romance in the past and I doubt I will ever fully make it back. Why would anyone think that I will be okay with the woman behaving in the similar fashion?
B-
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