Showing posts with label Love and Marriage. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Love and Marriage. Show all posts

Tuesday, January 20, 2026

First Love, Second Draft

With only about two months to go until the official OPENING DAY for Major League Baseball…this book is a great “season” appetizer, especially for reader-baseball fans… 

A wholesome, sweet love story about how a couple, divorced for five years, gets a second chance to fall in love all over again.

 

Becca Kinzer treats readers to a wholesome, sweet romance that brings together a couple divorced for five years in First Love, Second Draft.

 

Forty-two-year-old Gracie Parker of Alda, Illinois is a blocked romance writer. She’s also hobbling around, sidelined from a freak accident that injured her hip. She struggles to pay her medical bills and those of her ailing father. With Gracie in need of cash flow, her nephew slyly rents a refurbished cabin on her property to her ex-husband, Noah Parker, a 40-year-old, sidelined Major League pitcher for the Seattle Mariners plagued with issues of his own—including still carrying a romantic torch for Gracie.

 

Noah returns to town, offering to help Gracie convalesce in the hope he might also convince her to help him write his sports memoir. In reuniting, the couple begins to learn things they never knew about each other while also coming to terms with what drove them apart—Gracie was focused on a having a baby she couldn’t have and thus became resentful of Noah whose passions were with baseball. When Noah is asked to pitch for the World Series, the strides to rebuild the couple’s relationship are suddenly challenged and emotional wounds from the past once again resurface. 

 

With great tenderness, Kinzer (Dear Henry, Love Edith; Love in Tandem) delivers enough literary curve balls and changeups to keep readers fully invested in a hopeful story aimed on the prospect of new beginnings in life and in love.

 

First Love, Second Draft by Becca Kinzer

Tyndale Fiction, $17.99 paperback, 9781496489029, 320 pages

Publication Date: April 15, 2024

To order this book on Bookshop.org, link HERE

 

Learn more about author Becca Kinzer HERE

 

Wednesday, September 22, 2021

It's Better This Way

An emotionally evocative portrait of mid-life love complicated by blended family dynamics.

Debbie Macomber is never afraid to tackle hot-button contemporary issues. In It's Better This Way, she delivers a highly charged story that packs an emotional wallop, centered on the aftermath of breakups and a middle-aged romance that faces opposition from their two complicated families. 

This tightly woven story is bound by many threads. After 31 years of marriage, Julia Jones's golf-pro husband, Eddie, left her for another woman. Julia is finally ready, after six months of readjustment and transition, to embark on a new chapter in her life. She sells the family home and her design business and then moves into the Heritage, an upscale building in downtown Seattle, Wash. Her supportive adult daughters, Hillary and Marie--furious with their father, his choices and the hurtfulness of his actions--cheer her on. When Julia starts working out in the exercise room at the Heritage, she meets Heath, a divorced hedge-fund manager and father of two sons, Adam and Michael, close in age to Julia's girls. When Julia and Heath strike up a friendship that slowly begins to heat up into something more, their respective children become leery and try to quash the middle-aged couple's chance at forging new love.


Macomber (A Walk Along the BeachWindow on the Bay) has a firm grasp on issues that will resonate with readers of domestic fiction. Well-drawn characters and plotting--coupled with strong romantic subplots and striking coincidences--will keep readers rooting for forgiveness, hope and true love to conquer all.

 

It’s Better This Way by Debbie Macomber

Ballantine Books (Random House), $27.00, hardcover, 9781984818782, 320 pages

Publication Date: July 27, 2021

To order this book on INDIEBOUND, link HERE

 

NOTE: This review is a reprint and is being posted with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this review on Shelf Awareness: Reader's Edition (July 13, 2021), link HERE