“Val Shakely is a list-maker. Daily routine. Check. Calm, quiet (but successful) business. Check. No drama. No excitement. Some might call it boring, but it’s precisely the way Val likes it. She loves her hometown of Cambria, nestled in the mountains of Colorado, and runs a fruitful PR firm. It’s more than enough for Val. So what if she doesn’t have a social life? Then, her cousin Gwen decides to take on the local political bully, Mayor Roger Barton, in head-to-head combat for his poisition, and Val takes her company reluctantly, and against her better judgment, into the fray. The minute Val takes on Gwen’s campaign, the safe world she carefully constructed begins to unravel. She feels the pressure of the campaign and the personal attacks by Barton. And as if that wasn’t complicated enough, Val finds herself falling in love with local businessman John Hatfield, a man just as boring as her at first glance. Both charming and confrontational, Val is drawn to John in a way that cracks the simplicity of her life. In the end, Val’s desire to stay on the sidelines is put to the test and she’s forced to reexamine the life she’s built as she trudges toward a new and more exciting future.”
I enjoyed the election related story line. Some of it made me think of our recent presidential election – a big bully of a man running again a woman who wants to do good. It was interesting that the main character is not the woman running for mayor, but her cousin. The love story was almost an extra to the story about the campaign. Val meets John at a campaign event, but he really has nothing to do with the story other than the connection he forms with Val. At the same time, I think her relationship with him helped her to be able to come out of her shell, and ultimately to escape the sidelines. Of course, as a strong woman who ran her own PR firm, she could have done this on her own, but this is a romance after all!
What have you been reading lately?
