Love You, Mean It by Jilly Gagnon

 Caveat: All the cussing and dirty words did nothing to endear me to what was supposed to be a romance novel. The author needs to grow a better vocabulary. I would have thought she would have had a more extensive vocabulary being a Harvard graduate.

Ellie Greco may have gone too far to save her family’s historic deli in Milborough, Massachusetts, in  Love You, Mean It by Jilly Gagnon coming out April 30. She enters into a phony-bologna fling with Theo Taylor, the son of a businessman who wants to bring in a superstore that will put the Greco Deli out of business, in order for each of them to get what they want out of the ploy.

Ellie wants to save the business for her family, even though returning to Milborough means giving up on a career possibility she has been striving for in New York City. Theo, who is not a fan of his father’s, wants a free hand to develop the Taylor building in a way that will not threaten the small businesses like Ellie’s in the downtown area. The two plot a fake engagement that will push Ted Taylor to drop his plans for a gourmet food department store rather than ruin his future daughter-in-law's business.

 

What could go wrong with the pretend relationship? Will the stuck-up Taylor senior  buy into this romance between his elite son and a delicatessen owner he refers to as “a butcher”? How will Theo’s ex-fiancée favored by his father interfere with the plan when she reappears in Theo’s life? In the end, Ellie will have to decide what’s more important: her legacy business or a faux  romance that seems to be taking a different direction.

 

Jilly Gagnon,  the author of the young adult novel #famous and the suspense novel All Dressed Up, has had her work appear in Newsweek, Elle, Vanity Fair, and  The Huffington Post. A Minnesota native, she lives in Salem, Massachusetts.

Lucky by Jane Smiley

 Lucky is Jodie Rattler in Jane Smiley’s latest book of historical fiction coming out April 23. Jodie attributes the beginning of her lucky life to a horse race in St. Louis in 1955 when she was 6 in which she walked away with a roll of two-dollar bills thanks to her uncle. She keeps the roll as a good luck charm throughout her life.

The book becomes a biography of fictional Jodie as she develops an interest in folk music and finds some success as a singer-songwriter. The songs she writes earn her a steady income that her uncle invests wisely, providing a bankroll to land anywhere she wants, whether it is New York City, England, St. Thomas, or Los Angeles. Singing first with a band called the Freak-Outs, she later branches out on her own making albums, performing at gigs, and filling in for singers in other bands.

Along her journey, she becomes familiar with recording studios, backstages, and tours in a time when famous singers like Joan Baez, Judy Collins, and Joni Mitchell are making a name for themselves. She witnesses firsthand how the music is changing from folk music to pop, and she adjusts her style of singing accordingly. Other names like Lyle Lovett are dropped into the story as he invites her on stage to sing a duet with him. Many of the lyrics of the songs she writes are woven into the narrative.

While her musical life is satisfying, Jodie senses that something is missing in her life, and it is not that she never became a big star. Finding true love at an early age, she finds herself leaving it behind and experiences what she thinks of as life as a feminist: being able to conduct her life like men did such as sleeping around, logging 23 affairs by the time she reaches her 30^th birthday.

As the novel draws to a close, a startling turn occurs causing readers to question what they’ve just read but no spoilers here!

Jane Smiley won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1992 for A Thousand Acres, a story based on William Shakespeare's King Lear. Lucky is her 34^th book. Smiley has tackled a variety of topics during her long career, writing about everything from abolitionists to prostitutes, from horse racing to Hollywood, but this reader finds her farm stories to be her very best.

My review will be posted on Goodreads starting February 24, 2024.

I would like to thank Alfred A. Knopf and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC in return for an objective review.

 

 

Darling Girls by Sally Hepworth

Sisters by circumstance, Jessica, Norah, and Alicia survived foster care with Holly Fairchild in Sally Hepworth’s latest novel, Darling Girls, available April 23. Miss Fairchild, with her demanding rules and her unpredictable demeanor, psychologically scarred each of her charges. While social workers thought they had placed the children in good hands on a country estate called Wild Meadows in Port Agatha with horses and a swimming pool, they were so wrong.

Twenty-five years later, detectives from Melbourne are asking all three adult women questions about a body recently discovered when Miss Fairchild’s home was demolished. Bound together by misfortune, the women must face going back to Port Agatha to assist in the investigation, not sure if they are witnesses or suspects.

Jessica desperately craves the love she thought she was experiencing with Miss Fairchild until the other foster children came along. Norah struggles majorly with an intense anger that has landed her in trouble with the law as she has lashed out physically toward others. Alicia, who was only supposed to be a temporary placement while her grandmother was hospitalized, becomes a shadow of herself as she struggles to redeem her life by being a social worker who places children in foster homes.

Readers have come to expect twisty plots from author Sally Hepworth, and Darling Girls will not disappoint. She lives in Melbourne, Australia, with her family.

My review will be posted on Goodreads starting February 24, 2024.

I would like to thank St. Martin’s Press and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC in return for an objective review.