Contemporary Romance published by Berkley 25 Aug 20
It’s been a while since I’ve read Julia London. So with this cute-sounding new comtemp romance, I thought it would be a good place to catch up with her work. I liked the sound of the blurb, so I fired up my iBooks and got started.
But somewhere along the line, the cute-sounding stuff got sidetracked and I wasn’t reading the book I thought I would be from the blurb. Carly and Max are likable characters and I like the idea of the switched dogs, along with finding out how it would be resolved, all the while leading to romance. What I got instead is everything in Carly’s life going wrong at every turn, more time spent with characters in her life than with the hero she’s just discovered. I had hope that by Chapter 10 things would begin to turn around and look up for her, Max would be back from his trip that kept him out of town and out of her atmosphere, but that didn’t happen and I found myself quite frustrated and irritated. It’s just all too much going wrong in a short span of time, and that’s not fun for me.
Max’s life is better, and I like how he does what he can to help his dad take care of his autistic brother – that’s what keeps him out of town about the time I gave up reading. He’s more happy-go-lucky than Carly, mostly because he’s employed and isn’t having to scramble to make next month’s rent or keep selfish clients in check. But I wanted these two together much more than what I got so deep into the book.
I do like the scenes with the look-alike basset hounds, one bringing the other out of depression to enjoy being a dog. But even that, along with Max, wasn’t enough to keep me reading when so much silliness was going on in Carly’s life. Maybe if she’d lightened up earlier, found different clients earlier, whatever, I might have kept going. My own life is crazy enough, I don’t have the gumption to keep going through one debacle after another with Carly.
Grade: DNF
Summary:
Carly Kennedy’s life is in a spiral. She is drowning in work, her divorced parents are going through their midlife crises, and somehow Carly’s sister convinces her to foster Baxter–a basset hound rescue with a bad case of the blues. When Carly comes home late from work one day to discover that the dog walker has accidentally switched out Baxter for another perkier, friendlier basset hound, she has reached the end of her leash.
When Max Sheffington finds a depressed male basset hound in place of his cheerful Hazel, he is bewildered. But when cute, fiery Carly arrives on his doorstep, he is intrigued. He was expecting the dog walker, not a pretty woman with firm ideas about dog discipline. And Carly was not expecting a handsome, bespectacled man to be feeding her dog mac and cheese. Baxter is besotted with Hazel, and Carly realizes she may have found the key to her puppy’s happiness. For his sake, she starts to spend more time with Hazel and Max, until she begins to understand the appeal of falling for your polar opposite.
No excerpt available.
