When she agreed to spend her last summer before college at her cousins’ house in Ireland, Charli Moretti never expected to meet anyone like Rhys Doyle. He was the first boy to ever make her heart flutter, and though their lives followed different paths after that fateful summer, she always remembered him as her first everything.

Sixteen years later, after a tumultuous divorce from her abusive husband, Charli is returning to Ireland a shell of the woman she once was. Life has tried to break her many times over, and now all she wants is a fresh start and an even keel. She’ll be working as an accountant at her uncle’s hotel, but what she doesn’t know is that Rhys Doyle works there, too. He’s the head of security, in fact, and he’s no longer the teenage boy she once knew.

With the rumours flying around that he and his fiancée just broke off their engagement, Charli decides it’s best to give Rhys his space. She knows personally how hard it can be when a relationship ends. The problem is, she can’t seem to stop running into him, and the more she gets to know the man he’s become the more those old feelings start to return.

Tropes & Themes:
~Second chance~
~Workplace romance~
~Protector hero~
~Summer fling~
~Tragic past~
~Starting over~

Quiet Longing is book #2 in The Quiet Love Series and can be read as a standalone.

My Rating:

Favorite Quotes:

It was an ache I’d barely even known was there before I met her. I wasn’t entirely sure what it meant, but it felt a lot like longing. Longing for connection, for someone to understand me, to know and accept all the things I normally kept hidden.

This world is full of people who’ll put us down. We don’t need to do it to ourselves, too.

Being alone in a room with Rhys was like swallowing the antidote to all my worries and fears. His presence seeped into my bloodstream like medicine.

It was the kind of place a burglar only had to breathe on the locks to get inside.

I think of nothing else. If you cracked open my skull, all you’d find are thoughts of you…

My Review:

I always enjoy a second-chance romance, and although I don’t typically appreciate angst, I didn’t seem to mind it this time. Written with two timelines and in my favorite dual point of view, the storylines were engaging and realistic and laced together with real-life concerns. Ms. Cosway’s writing style continues to be easy to follow, thoughtfully parsed, and poignantly penned.

“Not everything is meant to know, Ilana. Some things need their mystery to survive.”

Ilana has an enviable job at the opera house, a committed relationship, and a cozy Greenwich Village apartment, but the questions inside of her are growing insistent. Is it due to her scientist boyfriend’s research on how people make their decisions, or is she suffering suppressed grief from the death of her adoptive mother? She becomes curious about who she would be if she’d grown up in her birth home. Is she truly who she thinks she is? Has she ever freely chosen anything at all? When Ilana learns that her birth mom owns a pub upstate, well, what harm could there be in furtively dropping by for a drink? To see, just to see. What begins as curiosity about her choices evolves into a traumatic shift in her world. She loses control of her life. And then, chaos.

Lost in Thought is a novel about unconscious decision-making and the illusion of free will.

My Rating:

Favorite Quotes:

All the flippancy of the evening disappeared. They sank into an earnest whisper. They spoke to each other like kids sharing mysteries while perched in a tree house and rapt in the quiet woods.

You’re born. You get so many minutes. You die. That’s kinda it. How you spend your minutes is the only thing.

Saint Bernadette’s was a dismal boarding house in the center of the city. The nuns performed their earthly penance by running it. They were brittle women, sexless, and looking longingly toward death.

They sat in quiet companionship. Ilana knew for all the gifts that life had given her— her privileged education, her quiet good looks, her sense of practicality— it was the gift of this friendship that she most treasured.

“He’s not a piece of real property.” “True, there is very little real about him at this point— not his teeth, his hair, his left knee, his right hip, or his erection. He is more a collage of spare parts.”

She strikes me as a woman who would ride a llama bareback through a burning building in a pair of crotchless panties if she damn well felt like it.

Whenever Willow had an idea, she made lists, and most of the time, ecstatic intentions aside, the only thing she actually accomplished was the list.

What was not being said was getting loud inside the silence.

My Review:

This was not a happy ever-after romance, this was a coming into oneself women’s fiction tale with characters who were imperfect, realistically flawed, and struggling with real-world issues, work, and personal baggage. While at times I felt conflicted with the vagaries of the storylines when they were not going in the direction I expected or hoped for, kudos must be given to this clever author for her writing style. It was profoundly perceptive, poignant, insightful, and well-nuanced with authentic quirk, while eloquently detailed in a witty brain-teasing manner in magnificent Technicolor. I had to whittle down several pages of favorite quotes for those to include in this review.

My Rating:

Favorite Quotes:

Witty had a flair for the dramatic, appropriate since he was the drama teacher, but he sounded like the town crier warning that the sky was falling. Last week, the cafeteria substituted brownies for layer cake, and he made it sound like nuclear winter.

People were still looking at me like an odd specimen, some kind of science experiment egg they were waiting to see hatch in captivity.

Lucy looked around my small rustic kitchen, peeked at all the take- out containers in my fridge, and shook her head. “We need to get you out of the house before you become one with the furniture.”

Don’t be a lonely pot when there’s a lid out there that suits you…

My Review:

This was a fun and breezy read laced with clever wit, well-polished and amusing narratives, and insightful inner musings. This was my second foray into this talented storyteller’s craft, and I am even more impressed with her skills. Stacy Travis has a new acolyte.

Take Me Home for Christmas
(The Amazing Doctors of Oak Bluff #1)
by Miranda Liasson

Author Bio:

Miranda Liasson loves to write stories about everyday people who find love despite themselves because there’s nothing like a great love story. And if there are a few laughs along the way, even better! She’s a Romance Writers of America Golden Heart winner and an Amazon bestselling author whose heartwarming and humorous small-town romances have won accolades such as the Gayle Wilson Award of Excellence and have been Harlequin Junkie and Night Owl Reviews Top Picks.

 

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