Review: Funny, Hot, Real - Everything You Crave in a Karen Stivali Book!
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 11 6, 2013
I am a fan of Karen Stivali's books. Her writing, her characters and her stories are all smart, funny, honest and real. And sexy. You cannot forget the sexy.As someone with a low tolerance for fluff and a high bar for story, for structure, and for development, I don't come to romance easily. I do, however, read all of Stivali's books. She takes a genre that is too often bogged down in drama and hyperbole and elevates it to a fun, funny and I-didn't-see-that-coming read.Leave the Lights On is the latest Stivali book. It follows two characters who had high-school crushes on one another as they move on to very different lives, only to meet up again when they have each earned some baggage. It is not a new premise and, in the hands of another author, could easily be a throw-the-book-across-the-room (or in the trash) read. Not this one. Stivali deftly avoids the mundane, the expected. She makes her characters work (hard) for their HEA. And, at times, she even leaves the reader wondering if they will ever achieve one.As someone who is now married to her college love - after 25 years apart - I know that these stories happen. I also know how hard they are to make work. Especially because each partner comes to the relationship with almost-unachievably-high expectations and the burden of so much baggage. I greatly respect Stivali for staying true to the difficulties of making such a relationship work, for her insistence at exploring the baggage these two characters bring with them, and for forcing them to find a way to overcome the scars their baggage has caused them.Lest that last paragraph scare you, take heed: this is a Karen Stivali book. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll be wowed by the sexual tension. Oh, and as the book's description intimates, you'll never look at a jar of peanut butter the same again.Buy it.