Review: Mid-life Romance with a confident heroine
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 10 4, 2013
This is the story of Lesley, a forty-something single woman who makes her living "flipping" houses in Chicago.  She decides to kill two birds with one stone by combining a visit to her family in Los Alamos, New Mexico with a home restoration project.Once in Los Alamos Lesley crosses paths with her former brother-in-law, Dominic.  Dominic is a single dad raising a sixteen year old son and running the local hardware store.  Dominic and Lesley are carrying a whole bunch of baggage from twenty years ago, and at first it doesn't look like they'll make it past the stage of trading snide comments and barbed insults.  But twenty years is a long time, and people do change.  Lesley and Dominic find that they are attracted to each other, but mid-life dating turns out to be full of complications.I really wanted to like this story, and I did end up enjoying some aspects of it, but overall it just didn't work for me.  Let's start with what did work:  I liked that Lesley was a mature, self-confident woman who didn't obsess over her age or marital status (a rare commodity in mid-life Romance heroines).  I enjoyed Dominic's relationship with his son, which was warm and affectionate and felt realistic.  The dialog had a natural feel to it and the character of Lesley's grandfather provided some comic relief.This definitely was not the kind of book that you just can't put down.  There were many lulls in the story and it felt like a chore to read in some places.  Dominic didn't have a realistic feel to me.  I'm all for mature characters in Romance, but he sounded like an elderly man constantly exclaiming "Glory Days!" (28 times - I actually counted).  And Dominic's mother?  What middle aged man lets his mother run his life the way Dominic and his brothers did?  And what woman would find that kind of man attractive?  The love scenes were too purple-prosey for my taste, with phrases like "liquid spirals of desire", "precious jewel" and "tiny pearl".  At one point Dom yells out "inna-gadda-da-vida" and I burst out laughing.The story is told in the third person, and there are times when the point of view changes abruptly giving you that "head hopping" feeling.  There are a lot of minor editing issues - missing words, garbled sentences, etc. that require that you do a fair amount of mental editing.  This would have benefited from a more conscientious proofreader.Would I recommend this?  Depends on what you're looking for.  Romances with middle-aged characters are not thick on the ground in Romancelandia, and while I didn't care much for this one many of my reasons are purely subjective.  The writing is certainly competent and the characters and storyline may resonate more with some readers than they did with me.Occasional swearing and sexual content.