Love-Lines

SHERI LANGER

Stats for my copy: .pdf, Red Adept Publishing, 2019.

How acquired: Received from Absolute Entertainment for review.

My thoughts: While I was reading this book I kept thinking it would make a great rom-com movie. While it wasn't laugh out loud funny, it was quite amusing. Fordham is a divorced mother raising her young daughter, Whitty, with the help of her own mother, Dorie, who lives with her. Whitty is ten, if I remember correctly, and a bit precocious, which happily was never pushed into plot moppet territory. Fordham dates but like so many women out there, she's not having any luck finding The One. She had The One in high school, who became The One That Got Away. And then later she married another The One, who turned out to be The Wrong One.

So now suddenly two men come into her life. First she meets David, the new principal at Whitty's school. And while she's attracted to him, he's already pretty chummy with Whitty's substitute teacher. Then she runs into her high school sweetheart, Aaron, and since said substitute teacher is hanging off David's arm half the time she sees him, she turns her attention to Aaron and rekindling their lost love.

The book is a light read with some deepness at it's core, if that makes sense. It's told in third person from Fordham's POV, so we spend a lot of time inside her head, privy to her thoughts and feelings, which is my favorite narrative device. At times it's a comedy of errors, with one thing after another going wrong for Fordham. Not far in I thought this is going to be a three star, maybe three and a half. But somewhere along the way I became very vested in Fordham's life, not to mention quite enamored of one of those two men, and I was very happy with the way the book ended. 

From what I found when I looked up the author, her first book was a YA, which I don't read much of, but I'll have to keep an eye out for her next novel.

Goodreads synopsis: What if you could find the love of your life just by reading between the lines? Single mom Fordham Price is juggling her job at a small publisher, her precocious ten-year-old daughter, and her feisty mother. She wants to find time for men, but after a series of dating disasters, her relationship status is still stuck at single. As if her macchiato lite wasn’t already overflowing, a co-worker gets pregnant, and Fordham is expected to step in and deliver the company’s latest reality read from the Flowers from the Heart series. She must now supplement her own romantic misadventures with tales of cynical cat-ladies, identical-twin husbands, spunky monks, and countless other web-crawlers. As she wades through the submissions, she finds one from a widower whose story gives her tingles in all the places she forgot existed. His words draw her in until she finds herself daydreaming about him more than she’d care to admit. Could she have a love like that, or will her romantic fate be forever bound to her philandering ex-husband?