Ally Blake

Ultra successful negotiator Harper returns to her hometown with serious reservations about her younger sister’s wedding and an attraction she does not want to feel for the best man who left a sour impression on Harper the last time they saw each other.

I loved the relationship between the sisters, that Harper’s story isn’t solely focused on her finding romantic love, it’s also about these two young women trying to figure out where they stand with each other now that Lola is grown and show more no longer in need of a substitute parent, so there’s this challenging and loving journey they’re on to transition from a mother/daughter dynamic into something more along the lines of equals and friends.

The backstories for both Harper and Cormac were really well-crafted, you could understand and more importantly feel how and why their pasts still weigh heavily on them and affect the present way they live their lives. I also felt like those backstories, the similarity in that each struggled with their parents and with keeping a roof over their heads, it made it so much easier to buy into the connection they form in only a week’s time than maybe it would have been had they not had something so important and so emotional in common.

The plot does include a couple misunderstandings that perhaps that character could have cleared up long ago, but for the most part, I think it made sense why that character let it fester in their heart rather than do some fact checking, given their age at the time, the upheaval, and the trauma with their parent, I could see wanting to hold onto that anger and/or hold onto the belief that it was in part another person’s fault.

With sweetness and swooniness (the photo booth and really every mention of it thereafter), along with personal histories for the heroine and hero that give the story depth and elicit empathy, A Week With The Best Man is a truly satisfying read. show less

I loved that for a decent chunk of this story Nora and Bennett who have never met in person only communicate via email and phone. There are plenty of romance novels where this might have left me antsy, impatient for them to be in the same room together, but the emails and the phone calls totally play to this author’s tremendous strengths. Ally Blake has a gift for banter, it’s always super flirty, intelligent, funny, and just when things feel lighter than air she’ll drop something show more poignant into the conversation and because of all that the physical distance didn’t detract from this romance, it actually added to it.

While I liked that there was a bit of mystery as to why Bennett ended up estranged from his adoptive grandmother, I do wish this had delved a little more into his family baggage once all was revealed.

As for Nora’s emotional arc, from the way she modifies her personality for other people to her occasionally revealing little somethings about growing up a foster kid (those were often the poignant bits dropped into conversations), and the moments where she’d struggle with angry feelings towards Bennett for having the childhood she longed for, I just genuinely felt for her every step of the way. show less

This had a fun concept, a young woman is accidentally booked onto a cruise full of elderly couples and falls for a crew member on board the ship, beyond the concept though, this felt somewhat underdeveloped.

I tend to like stories where an older character shares their wisdom (in a non-preachy way) with a younger one. While the senior citizens actively wanted a happily ever after for J.J., they were mostly used for humor (much of that humor about their continued interest in sex), which I show more didn’t mind, but I was a little disappointed that there weren’t a few more moments of substance for the elderly characters.

Setting isn’t always a big deal to me, but when the setting involves something relatively unusual like a cruise ship, I do want the experience to feel a bit more vicarious, a bit more descriptive than I found this to be.

As for the romance, while there was chemistry, there wasn’t enough of anything else. What little tension there was between them wasn’t strung out for very long (or at least not very long by the standards of a reader who prefers a slow burn), in addition to that the conflict keeping them apart wasn’t all that apparent, and although each had baggage (Kane suffered a great loss, JJ had an extremely brief marriage) those didn’t really fuel goals or growth arcs or a concrete plot of any sort.

There are plenty of books by this author I’d recommend like Faking It To Making It, this one though just fell a little bit shy of what I was looking for at the moment, but if you’ve read a bunch of romances lately that felt too plot forward or too angsty, this one, without much drama, may feel like a good palette cleanser. show less

There’s an enjoyable dynamic between Angus and his assistant, Lucinda, like His Girl Friday or Harvey and Donna on the TV series Suits. They’re intelligent, they’re flirty, and their individual strengths make them a perfect team at work. I really liked their chemistry, I liked that they’ve crushed on one another for so long and how much fun the other characters had with their obvious attraction to one another.

Where this lost me a little was after their relationship takes a major show more turn. I get that they’re running scared, but the incidents that triggered the running scared seemed a bit flimsy, Lucinda jumping to a conclusion about Angus’s actions and Angus buying into something that was clearly only said to appease Lucinda’s son. I didn’t love how passive they became or that communication pretty much went away. It’s not that I wanted one conversation to solve everything, definitely not, it’s just that it seemed strange that they didn’t even attempt to talk when there was so much on the line, their friendship, their work relationship, and Angus’s importance to Lucinda’s son.

While that section of the novel wasn’t my favorite, the smaller details throughout the book very much appealed to me. I liked that Lucinda and Angus watch a supernatural teen drama as an excuse to spend time together. I liked that Lucinda uses pencils even though hardly anyone takes notes with pencils these days and how the vibe of her pencils combined with her clothes felt like a nod to the look of classic romantic comedies. I liked that in practically any other romance a guy salivates over a black dress or a red dress yet here it’s all about spring green and there’s just something so refreshing in that. I loved that even though the story wasn’t quite what I wanted for a chunk of time, these little things still made it feel like a special, worthwhile read. show less